Development of a Supplier Data Quality and Engagement Framework for Scope 3 Greenhouse Gas Accounting in Industrial Supply Chains

This paper set out to convert Scope 3 supplier data quality from a qualitative concern into a quantity that supports resource allocation. The Supplier Data Quality and Engagement Framework scores each category on pedigree, primary-data share and emission-factor quality, maps the composite to an uncertainty band, propagates it to inventory level, and ranks categories by emissions share, data weakness and contractual leverage. Applied to the only category-level Scope 3 inventory published in a sample of five large Indian industrial companies, the framework returns an inventory uncertainty of 45.7 per cent and identifies two categories, carrying 99.1 per cent of emissions, whose upgrading to primary-data quality would reduce that figure to 18.2 per cent. The priority ordering is stable across five thousand weighting draws. The wider empirical finding is one of absence: no company in the sample publishes a data-quality score, an uncertainty estimate or a primary-data share for any Scope 3 category; only one publishes an absolute supplier count, and that without emissions or data-quality attributes; three of the five publish no Scope 3 category detail at all, and for a fourth the category table was not retrieved from the sections examined. Supplier engagement is extensively described in qualitative terms and nowhere connected to the reliability of the reported inventory. Three directions follow. The uncertainty mapping of (6) should be calibrated against observed variance from firms that have replaced spend-based factors with supplier-specific data, allowing the anchors to be estimated rather than assumed. The framework should be applied at supplier rather than category level once disclosure or internal data permits, which would make the leverage coefficient an observable procurement variable and would allow the marginal uncertainty reduction of (9) to be divided by the cost of the engagement programme that delivers it, the criterion a firm with a binding budget actually needs. And the regulatory implication deserves testing: requiring disclosure of primary-data share by category would cost reporters little, since they must already know it to perform the calculation, and would make Scope 3 inventories comparable in a way that totals alone can never be.

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