A city is a collection of a number of organisations and networks. We've started our map looking at local government bodies (councils of all types) because these are already the most transparent in terms of visibility of supply chain. The more organisations we can see in that city, and the relationships they have with each other and their suppliers, the more transparent they become.
Whilst transparency itself isn't a quantifiable measure, we have defined a number of levels of transparency to help us measure progress.
Level 0 Transparency is when you know exactly who you are buying from. This means that we are able to match a supplier to an exact financial entity with a unique reference number that is recognisable across other systems. This could be a company number as held in Companies House, or it could be a VAT number. There are unique numbers called DUNS, which are a proprietary reference number created by Dun & Bradstreet, and there are other open formats called Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs). In the latter case LEIs can be issued to "natural persons" if they are actiing in an independent business capacity.
Level 1 Transparency is where it gets interesting. This is where suppliers share their own tier 1 suppliers. Transparency increases exponentially at this point and we can start to do some very clever predictive analytics with this live data.
Beyond Level 1 the focus is about seeing deeper into supply chains on a more or less live basis. Interestingly, our research is starting to show us that whilst individuals are connected through six or seven degrees of freedom, you need far less to identify exploitation within supply chains.