Framework-derived, not framework-inspired.
Every question we ask your suppliers traces to a specific disclosure requirement you are already accountable for.
This page is written for risk, procurement and sustainability teams at South African corporates. If you are a supplier who has been invited to complete an assessment, start here instead.
You can report on your own operations with reasonable confidence. You have payroll data, utility bills, fleet records. What you cannot report on is your supply chain — because your suppliers, predominantly South African SMEs, have no standardised way to collect, verify or disclose ESG data.
The workarounds all fail in the same place. Manual supplier questionnaires produce inconsistent, unverifiable responses from a fraction of your supplier base, months after they are sent, and cannot be compared year on year. Global assessment platforms are methodologically rigorous but priced for multinational tier-one suppliers and calibrated for European regulation — B-BBEE, CIPC registration, SARS compliance and sector transformation requirements do not feature in them. And disclosure by assertion — "we are committed to responsible procurement" — is running out of road as IFRS S2 adoption progresses and investor scrutiny tightens.
Chainscore was built for the gap that leaves: your domestic SME supplier base, which is typically where the highest ESG risk actually sits, and where none of the existing instruments reach.
There are two ways to build an ESG scoring methodology. You can decide what good practice looks like and score against your own opinion of it — that is how most ESG ratings work, and it is why two providers can rate the same company very differently. Or you can start from the disclosure requirements the buyer is already legally or contractually accountable for, and work backwards to the questions that produce that evidence.
Chainscore does the second. Every scored question is tagged to the specific requirement it feeds. Nothing is asked of your suppliers because it sounds responsible.
| Framework | What it requires of your supply chain | What Chainscore produces for you |
|---|---|---|
| GRI 308 / 414 | Disclose suppliers screened on environmental and social criteria, the significant negative impacts found, and the actions taken. Year-on-year improvement must be evidenced. | Verified supplier scores per pillar, risk band with recommended action, and delta scoring across cycles — direct GRI 308-2 and 414-2 evidence. |
| IFRS S2 | Scope 3 Category 1 — purchased goods and services. Estimated GHG intensity across the supplier base. | A supplier-level GHG estimate derived from questionnaire data, aggregated by tier across your portfolio. |
| King IV — Principle 13 | Your governing body must oversee risks and opportunities in the supply chain. Material supply chain ESG risk requires board-level disclosure. | A board-ready summary, a material risk register by supplier, and an audit trail of risk decisions and actions taken. |
| JSE Sustainability Disclosure Guidance — S2.4b | Disclose local procurement spend and supply chain transformation metrics. | B-BBEE level by supplier, local versus foreign procurement split, and an enterprise development spend schedule. |
| OHS Act s.37(2) | As principal, you are liable for subcontractor health and safety. Active oversight must be demonstrable. | A health and safety score per subcontractor, lost-time injury data, and documented OHS status. |
| B-BBEE Codes — Enterprise & Supplier Development | ESD spend must be evidenced and directed at qualifying beneficiaries. | Supplier-level B-BBEE status and a scored Improvement Roadmap that turns your ESD spend into a targeted intervention with a measurable result. |
| Employment Equity Act | Workforce transformation and EE reporting obligations extend into supplier assessment. | EE submission status and workforce composition data per supplier. |
Every scored question is tagged to the disclosure requirements it feeds — across the standards above and others including GRI 302, 303, 305, 306, 403, 404 and 405, POPIA, the Carbon Tax Act, the FIC Act, the Companies Act and NEMA.
A large-spend supplier in a high-exposure sector carries more material risk for you than a small-spend supplier in a low-exposure one. And charging a micro-enterprise for an ESG assessment guarantees it never participates — which is exactly how supplier ESG programmes end up covering your top twenty suppliers by spend and nothing else. Tiering resolves both problems.
| Tier 1 — Screening | Tier 2 — Assessment | Tier 3 — Verification | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope | A short screening set | A fuller assessment across E, S and G | A document-backed evidence set |
| Establishes | Legal and regulatory existence | Substantive practice across all three pillars | Documentary proof of what was claimed |
| Verification | External register checks | Register checks plus substance review | Full document review and authenticity checks |
| Badge earned | Emerging | Core Verified | Advanced Verified |
| Confidence in the score you see | Lowest | Higher | Highest — auditable |
Tier assignment is not permanent. Your suppliers are reassessed at your annual refresh and can escalate or de-escalate as spend, sector risk or previous findings change. An elevated or high-risk result at Tier 1 escalates that supplier automatically.
Your supplier completes one assessment. What happens to that data afterwards depends entirely on who is asking: one number belongs to them, and one belongs to you.
The badge belongs to the supplier, not to you. It is calculated on standard published Chainscore weights and deliberately does not apply the sector inherent-risk factor. Two suppliers with identical practices earn identical badges regardless of sector, which is what makes the badge portable: it travels with them to every other buyer on the network, and it means the same thing when it arrives. That portability is what persuades your suppliers to complete the assessment properly in the first place.
Your score is private to you and is never shown to the supplier or to any other buyer. It applies your materiality configuration and that supplier's sector exposure, and reflects what this supplier means to your risk position.
Most weighted ESG models let a client dial pillar weights: more E, less G. That is too blunt to be useful. Two corporates that both want "more environmental emphasis" can mean completely different things — one means Scope 3, fuel and emissions; the other means water, waste and licensing. Pillar weighting treats them identically.
Your onboarding starts with a materiality conversation. You select the risk themes that are material to your business and the disclosure requirements you actually report against. Each selection uplifts the specific questions that serve it. Pillar weights are an output of your configuration, not an input — which structurally removes the double-counting that pillar-level weighting introduces.
The practical effect: you and another client can end up with near-identical environmental emphasis overall and still score the same supplier differently, because you have uplifted energy and emissions questions while they have uplifted water and waste. That is the point.
Your configuration is your confidential input. The method that translates it into scoring emphasis is ours.
Most scoring systems have no path for "not applicable," so a professional services supplier with no fleet, no site licence and no process water scores as though it failed the fleet, licence and water questions. The score that produces is not a measure of risk — it is a measure of how many questions happened to be irrelevant. It also tells you nothing useful about which of your suppliers to act on first.
Chainscore handles applicability structurally. Where a question is genuinely not applicable to a supplier's sector, it is removed from both the numerator and the denominator and the score is renormalised — not discounted, not zero-scored. Applicability is justified against a closed sector taxonomy rather than free text, so the same sector is always treated the same way across your supplier base.
Self-reported data that nobody checks is not evidence, and cannot support a disclosure you are accountable for. Depending on tier, supplier responses are checked against:
On B-BBEE specifically: Chainscore confirms that a certificate presented by a supplier is genuine. It does not conduct B-BBEE verification and is not a verification agency — that is the work of SANAS-accredited bodies.
Every data point carries a quality flag: Documented, Self-reported, or Proxy. Confidence ratings rise with tier and with documentary backing, and the confidence attached to a score is shown to you alongside it rather than buried — so you know how much weight a number can carry before you put it in front of your board.
Non-response has a cost. A supplier who does not complete an assessment receives a proxy score based on sector and size, with a non-disclosure risk uplift applied and data quality flagged as low confidence. Silence is not treated as neutral.
| Band | Score | What it signals |
|---|---|---|
| Low | 76–100 | Good standing. Maintain and re-assess at cycle. |
| Moderate | 56–75 | Monitor. Roadmap actions are targeted but not urgent. |
| Elevated | 31–55 | Action needed. Roadmap escalated; tier escalation may be triggered. |
| High | 0–30 | Escalate. Full documentation review before a remediation plan is accepted. |
Badges require a score, not just completion. Emerging is earned on Tier 1 completion. Core Verified requires the Tier 2 assessment and a minimum score. Advanced Verified requires verified Tier 3 documentation and a higher minimum again. Thresholds are published in the supplier guidance — a supplier cannot complete their way to a high badge.
One assessment event kicks off a twelve-month cycle against your financial year. The delta between cycles is the point.
Assessment in month one. Improvement Roadmap issued to the supplier in months one to two. A development period through the year, where your Enterprise & Supplier Development spend has a defined target rather than a general intention. Pre-assessment check-in in months ten to eleven. Re-assessment at month twelve — new score, new badge, updated position in your portfolio view.
GRI 308-2 and 414-2 do not ask whether you screened your suppliers. They ask what you found and what changed. A single-cycle score cannot answer that. Two cycles can.
A methodology that claims everything is worth nothing. Before you rely on a Chainscore output, these are the boundaries.
The methodology document, the tiered questionnaire and the scoring engine are generated from a single specification file. A change to a question, a weighting or a framework mapping changes all three at once, or none of them. There is no version of the methodology that describes something the engine does not do.
The methodology is versioned and released under change control. Clients are notified of any change that affects how their suppliers are scored.
The full methodology runs deeper than a web page can carry. If you are assessing whether it holds up, request a briefing and we will take your risk, procurement or sustainability team through it directly.
Request a briefing