Singlebrook talks with Sourcemap CEO and Founder Leo Bonanni about his social network for supply chain visibility. His crowdsourced platform is mapping global supply chains, allowing companies to measure their global impacts and become more resilient to disruptions caused by global events like natural disasters.

Singlebrook: Please give a brief overview of what your organization does.

In recent years, it’s become pretty clear that organizations need visibility into their supply chains, whether it’s because of natural disasters, social and political unrest, or sustainability efforts. Sourcemap is a website that’s dedicated to answering the question of “where things come from”. It's a crowdsourced platform like Wikipedia, except instead of encyclopedia articles, there are thousands of maps showing the sources of the raw materials behind everyday products.

Sourcemap provides a custom built social network for organizations to communicate with their extended supply chain. It works a lot like LinkedIn, where a company invites their direct suppliers, who then invite their suppliers, and so on. At that point, a company has visibility into the real source of raw materials. Any company that wants to put itself on the map and tell the world about its supply chain can do it for free.

SB: Who is using the platform now?

Our platform is used by manufacturers, NGOs, public sector groups--basically anybody who wants a better handle on their supply chain. Our most far-reaching work is to try to connect people across global commodity supply chains where there is sometimes a lack of visibility and some potential for social and environmental problems as a result.

One such project is a platform we’ve been developing for Mars Chocolate, essentially to connect the purchasing and sustainability managers directly with farmers and farm organizations in West Africa. That direct connection happens through our software and through Android phones that are deployed in the field, and it allows them to have near-real-time visibility into the social, environmental and financial conditions on the ground.

SB: How did you come up with the idea for Sourcemap?

In 2008-2009, a lot of people started to take seriously the idea of carbon labeling and the idea that consumers would be able to compare products by comparing their environmental impact. When I tried to do that, to evaluate the impact of products as part of my research at the MIT Media Lab, I realized there was a big piece of data missing.

If you don’t know where products come from, you can’t measure their environmental impact or their social impact. I set out to solve the problem of supply chain visibility as a research project and quickly realized that supply chains are vast social networks that also include hundreds of thousands of individuals and companies needed to make a single product. The approach that I took and that my team developed with me is basically crowdsourcing--allowing people to communicate through a social network.

We set out making this tool a little before the market asked for it. In 2011, the tsunami that hit Japan had devastating consequences globally. We realized that this project had a lot of potential use for companies that had never before realized their vulnerability to events and disruptions halfway around the world. We spun out of MIT into a startup, and since then, we’ve been developing and installing our software for organizations to give them that real-time connection.

SB: What have been a few of the biggest challenges you’ve faced and how did you handle them?

A big challenge has been that a lot of organizations have not put in place the data that they need to actually map their supply chain. Over and over, big companies and manufacturers don’t have a firm grasp on who their suppliers are. They don’t have a central database where all the addresses and contact information is stored.

We’ve created a new business process for organizational readiness to prepare companies to actually map their supply chains. We bring tools to them that help evaluate risk and evaluate environmental and social sustainability. A lot of companies want to make a positive impact on the world, they just don’t have the data needed to actually measure their current impact and what they would need to do to improve it.

We’ve almost entirely focused our software on facilitating that task and allowing them to collect data faster and cheaper than ever before. We work very closely with our customers to welcome them and their suppliers to the platform, to train everybody and support them in this new endeavor to map supply chains. We have a support staff that works closely to configure systems so that they make sense for each organization. We do it all remotely from our offices in the US because every supply chain is global and we have customers all over the world.

SB: What channels have you found to be most effective in attracting attention for your platform?

We’re the only supply chain company with a public-facing website where anybody can register and see thousands of industrial supply chains and understand how things are made. That free website is being used by millions of people and it’s the main way that people find out about Sourcemap and understand how vast supply chains are and how important it is to measure their impact. If it wasn’t for that crowdsourced platform, we wouldn’t exist.

Having millions of online users has taught us a lot about building intuitive software and making it possible for people who’ve never thought about supply chains before to effectively measure and tackle their impact.

SB: How do companies address issues within their supply chains if something goes wrong or a supplier is doing something unsustainable?

One of the things we’re discovering is that companies want to measure their impact. So, when one of our customers invites their suppliers to share information about their carbon footprint or their water usage or their waste, we find the suppliers are generally very receptive because, in many cases, it’s the first time they’ve measured their environmental impact, and it’s the first time they can benchmark their performance against their competition.

While it sometimes brings up less-desirable aspects of a company’s performance, we find that both sides benefit. Our customers benefit because they can understand their overall impact, and their suppliers benefit because they can understand which areas to improve.

SB: That seems to be an area where some real change can occur within the suppliers’ operations.

It is. We’re seeing companies make their purchasing choices informed by the triple bottom line: the social, the environmental and the financial aspect. This data collection--in the beginning it’s a way to understand the impact of a company’s global operations--but in the subsequent years that they refresh the data, we find that companies are actually making different purchasing choices based on triple bottom line metrics.

SB: What advice do you have for aspiring social entrepreneurs?

I think social entrepreneurship is the future of all entrepreneurship. The new generation of job seekers is looking for work that has a positive social impact in addition to other benefits. Everybody needs to now formulate their company in terms of what positive social impact it will bring.

That also means you can start a company very lean and very quickly if you have a social mission well-defined because that’s going to be the way to attract team members. It’s also going to be what attracts customers. Our customers have all come to us because they have an underlying social mission or corporate social responsibility agenda. They’re looking for technology providers that share that vision with them.

SB: What is your “ask” of the community at this point in your venture?

We’re always on the lookout for socially conscious, motivated programmers to join our team in NY and in Boston. We’re also looking for analysts that would like to work with our customers for onboarding around supply chain visibility. And finally, if you know of any businesses or organizations that want to map their supply chain, you can direct them to our free website: sourcemap.com.

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