How to prep a supplier address list before a hazard screening run

Most hazard screening runs don't fail because the imagery is wrong. They fail because the address list going in was never checked against where the supplier sits. A ranked register is only as good as the rows you fed it, and vendor master data was built for accounts payable, not for plotting a pin on a flood plain.

Before you send a supplier list out for screening, it's worth an afternoon to clean it up. Here's what trips people up.

Pick the right address field, not the default one

Every ERP has three or four address fields per vendor record, and they rarely agree. Bill-to is usually a finance office or a shared services center, often in a different city than the plant. Ship-to can be a distribution dock, not the manufacturing site itself. Remit-to is sometimes a factoring company's address and has nothing to do with physical operations.

The field you want is the one for the production facility, the warehouse, the processing plant, the physical footprint that would be sitting in a flood plain or a wildfire corridor if one existed. That's rarely the field procurement systems default to when they export a vendor list. Pull the supplier's own site registration or facility ID if your system tracks one separately from the billing record. If it doesn't, a quick email to your supplier quality or sourcing contact asking "which address is the plant" beats guessing from the AP export.

One vendor, multiple sites

A single vendor number in your system often covers more than one physical location: a corporate parent with three regional plants, a distributor with five warehouses, a contract manufacturer running two shifts out of two buildings on opposite sides of a county. If your hazard screening runs off the vendor list as-is, you'll screen the headquarters and miss the plant that's exposed.

Split these before you submit the list. Each physical site needs its own row with its own address, even if they share a vendor ID and a remittance address. This is the single biggest source of undercounted exposure we see in supplier lists: one row standing in for three buildings, two of which never get checked.

Clean duplicates and dead records

Vendor lists accumulate dead weight: suppliers you stopped using two contracts ago, duplicate entries from a merger that never got consolidated, test records someone's ERP implementation left behind. Running a hazard screen against all of it wastes a slot in the register on something that doesn't need one.

A fast pass: sort by vendor name and address, flag anything that hasn't had a PO in the last 18 months, and check for near-duplicate names (the "Acme Inc." and "Acme Incorporated" problem) that usually mean two records for one supplier. Cut these without waiting on sign-off for every line. The goal is a list that represents the sites you're sourcing from this year, not every vendor that's ever touched your ledger.

Address format matters more than you'd think

A screening run geocodes the address to a point before anything gets checked against hazard layers. Addresses that are missing a street number, use a PO box instead of a physical location, or list only a city and state will geocode to somewhere approximate, sometimes miles from the actual site. That's enough to put a plant on the wrong side of a flood plain boundary.

Standardize to a full street address with postal code where you can get one. If a supplier only has a PO box on file, that's a flag to go get the physical address before the row goes into the screening batch, not after the register comes back with a gap in it.

What a clean list looks like before you submit it

One row per physical site. A real street address tied to the plant or warehouse, not the billing office. Dead vendors and duplicates cut. A consistent column for site name so the register that comes back maps cleanly to the list you started with.

That's the input Supply Chain Hazard Mapping turns into a ranked hazard register once a year, with each site carrying its own exposure tier and the imagery basis behind the call. The cleanup is on your end. The screening is on ours.

If your supplier list is in reasonable shape already, it's worth seeing what a ranked register from your own footprint looks like.