Customer proof
1,000 supplier sustainability contacts a year, for a third of what the consultant list cost
A Fortune 500 medical device manufacturer with more than 60,000 suppliers. The company is anonymized here because we are under NDA. We can arrange a reference conversation when a discussion gets serious.
The situation
- 1. The company had committed to SBTi and CDP supplier programs. Both require supplier-level sustainability data: emissions figures, policies, reduction targets, questionnaire responses.
- 2. More than 1,000 suppliers were in scope for that outreach. The team had a reliable sustainability or EHS contact for roughly 300 of them.
- 3. Their procurement systems were full of contacts, but those contacts handle orders, invoices, and delivery. They cannot answer a question about Scope 3 emissions or complete an EcoVadis questionnaire.
- 4. Manual research ran at 10 to 15 contacts a day. At that rate the remaining 700 suppliers represented months of dedicated effort.
"Hours that we spent just chasing down, scrubbing emails. Oh my gosh."
Before and after
| Measure | Before | With Bridgecurrent |
|---|---|---|
| Suppliers needing sustainability contacts | 1,000+ | 1,000+ |
| Reliable contacts available | About 300 | 1,000 delivered per year |
| Research success rate | About 60% with consultants | 95%+ qualified contacts found |
| Cost | $120,000+ for 500 contacts, paid once | About a third of that, ongoing |
| Contact refresh | Manual and ad hoc | Quarterly, automatic |
| Team access | Not applicable | Unlimited seats |
They tried the consultant route first
The team outsourced the contact research to consultants once. That kind of engagement is staffed with 5 to 8 full-time consultants working 4 to 12 weeks, and for 500 supplier contacts it runs $120,000 or more. They paid it.
The deliverable was a spreadsheet, accurate on the day it shipped, with no maintenance afterwards. About 60% of the contacts were usable, and within a year the list had gone stale. Sustainability reporting is annual and supplier contacts change constantly, so a snapshot solved that year and did nothing for the next one. When the renewal decision came, this team, sitting inside a procurement budget, declined to pay six figures a second time.
What the engagement includes
Contact discovery
A validated sustainability, EHS, or quality contact per supplier, with verified email, role context, and alternates.
Quarterly staleness checks
Every quarter the system re-checks delivered contacts. When someone has left or an address stops working, a replacement search runs automatically.
Unlimited seats
Quality, procurement, and other functional teams use the same service without extra licence cost. Multiple teams at this customer have asked for access.
Contact discovery performance
95%+
Qualified contacts found across supplier lookups
100%
Delivered contacts email-validated before handoff
Same day
Typical turnaround for contact discovery
"I can see the potential here for this to be like a kind of a game changer for us."
Where this goes next
This engagement is contact discovery. The next step, which is built and available, is outreach: sending the sustainability request from the company's own email domain, following up until the response lands, triaging replies, and building the escalation list. That removes the manual email cycle for the suppliers where a contact already exists, so the team manages the program instead of chasing it supplier by supplier.
Want to see what your supplier list looks like?
We run discovery on a sample of your suppliers before you commit to anything, so you can judge the output on your own supplier names rather than ours.