How often should a supplier hazard register be refreshed?

Most procurement teams don't ask this question until an insurer, an auditor, or a board report forces the issue. By then the hazard register they're holding is usually a few years old, built off a batch of flood-zone PDFs someone pulled when the vendor list was a third of its current size.

The short answer: annually, at minimum, and sooner if your supplier footprint has moved.

Why annual is the baseline, not a compromise

Flood plains get remapped. Wildfire fuel loads build up or burn off in a single dry season. Storm surge models get revised after a bad hurricane year. A site that sat outside a mapped flood zone in 2023 can sit inside a redrawn one in 2025, and nothing about the supplier's address changed. The ground did.

An annual refresh catches that drift without turning hazard screening into a full-time job. Quarterly re-screening sounds more rigorous on paper, but hazard exposure for a fixed physical site rarely shifts quarter to quarter. What shifts quarter to quarter is your vendor list.

What forces an off-cycle re-screen

A few events should pull a supplier's record forward regardless of where you sit in the annual calendar:

• You onboard a new supplier, especially in a region you don't have a recent read on.
• A supplier relocates, adds a second site, or you find out they're subcontracting to a facility you've never screened.
• A major flood, wildfire, or storm hits a region where you've got concentrated supplier exposure, even if your specific sites weren't named in the reporting.
• An insurer or a customer audit asks for hazard exposure by site, and you realize the last register predates half your current vendor list.

Any one of these is reason enough to check that supplier now rather than wait for the next scheduled pass.

The part that goes stale

Being specific here matters. The supplier's address almost never changes. The hazard layers underneath it do, and so does the imagery your last call was based on. A flood-zone determination run off five-year-old satellite imagery misses new development, changed drainage, a landslide scar that opened up two winters back. If nobody can say how old the imagery behind your last register is, you don't actually know how current the register is either.

An annual screen against current high-resolution imagery closes that gap. Each pass is a dated record: this site, this hazard type, this exposure tier, checked against imagery from this year instead of whichever year the last spreadsheet was built.

Where to put the cadence

The refresh holds up best when it rides on something that already happens every year, supplier recertification, annual vendor audits, insurance renewal, rather than sitting on a separate risk-team calendar that gets deprioritized the first time there's a staffing crunch. Attach it to the cycle that already exists and it won't quietly slip a year.

For sites in your highest exposure tier, some risk teams check twice a year and leave everything else on the standard annual run. That puts the extra effort where it pays off instead of doubling the workload across the whole list.

Supply Chain Hazard Mapping runs this as a standing annual pass: your full vendor list screened against flood plain, wildfire fuel load, landslide terrain and storm surge exposure, returned as a ranked register you can hand straight to procurement or an insurer. Each entry carries the hazard type, exposure tier, and the imagery basis for the call, so nobody has to guess how old the data is.

If your last hazard register predates half your current supplier list, that's your answer.