Please note: This feature is available to all users. If you haven’t had it turned on yet, please reach out to your dedicated Customer Success Consultant or Account Executive to learn about next steps.
What is Scoping?
Scoping in Prewave is your strategic entry point for understanding potential risks across your entire supply chain. Instead of examining each supplier individually, the Scoping tool groups suppliers into manageable “clusters” based on two key risk factors:
The country in which a supplier operates
The commodity or industry in which they operate
This enables you to perform a preliminary risk assessment across broad segments of your supply chain efficiently—before diving deeper into specific supplier evaluations.
Why is Scoping Important?
Modern regulations such as the LkSG, CSDDD, and NTA require companies to identify and prioritize likely negative impacts throughout their value chain. However, reviewing every supplier in detail is often too resource-intensive. Scoping helps you meet these challenges by:
Providing insights even when full supplier data is missing
Helping you prioritize efforts where risk is highest
Offering a standardized, scalable method for early-stage risk analysis
How You Benefit from Scoping in Prewave
Using the Scoping tool, you can:
Identify high-risk clusters: Focus attention on suppliers operating in high-risk regions or industries.
Quickly assess your entire value chain: Gain a top-down risk perspective across thousands of suppliers in minutes.
Understand commodity and regional risk trends: Spot hot spots in your supply chain and inform your next compliance or due diligence steps.
How to Use Scoping
Accessing the Scoping Tool
To begin, navigate to the Scoping tab in the top bar of the Prewave application.
Once inside, you can either start a new scope or view an existing one.
Users with the Scoping Access permission can create and edit scopes. All users within the same organization have viewing access to scopes by default.
Start a New Scope
When you choose to Start a new scope, you will be guided through a four-step process:
General Information – Define the parameters of the scope analysis.
Scoping – Select whether to include own operations, tier-1, or tier-N suppliers.
Supplier Selection – Choose specific suppliers from your network.
Collections Review – Review and manage the collections created from this scoping process.
Scope List View - Column Definitions
Scope Name: Name of the scope, as entered by the creator
Created By: User who created the scope
Perspective: The selected perspective used to generate supplier scores
Scoping Period: Time frame during which suppliers are evaluated
Date Timestamp: The date on which scores were retrieved (can differ from creation date)
Date Created: When the scope was originally created
Date Completed: When the scope was finalized
Collections Created: Number of collections generated from this scope
Status: Indicates whether the scope is "Open" (editable) or "Completed" (locked for changes)
Scoping
This is the first step in the scoping process where all suppliers are represented in “clusters.” These clusters are created based on the combined country and commodity risks of each supplier, resulting in a composite abstract risk score. This approach enables efficient and scalable supplier evaluation.
This step is applied separately to each part of the supply chain:
Own operations
Tier-1 suppliers
Tier-N suppliers
Examples of Clusters
Country Scores – Derived from indices that assess country-level risks based on the selected perspective (e.g., corruption, labor rights, environmental health).
Commodity Scores – Based on meta-analyses of risk types associated with specific commodities, including event frequency and severity.
Use filters to set a preferred score range and add relevant clusters to your scope. The histogram and matrix visuals help you explore the distribution and size of clusters in different score zones. You can add or remove clusters freely until the scope status is marked as "Completed" on the Collections page.
Supplier Selection
The second step involves further evaluating suppliers based on individual risk scores, their criticality in your value chain, product rarity, and other criteria. Any suppliers belonging to a cluster that was added to scope will be included by default.
You can also manually add or remove suppliers from scope to refine the analysis. This step is unique for each part of the supply chain:
Own operations
Tier-1 suppliers
Tier-N suppliers
You can create new collections or add selected suppliers to existing ones directly from the Supplier Selection step. These options are available next to the “add” and “remove from scope” actions.
Please note that collections maintain their permission settings: You can only add suppliers to collections that you either created or already have access to. Suppliers can be part of multiple collections, and you can generate several collections from a single scope. To remove a supplier from a scope, navigate to the “My Network” page and edit the relevant collection.
Collections Review
All collections created during the scope analysis are listed and managed under the Collections tab in the workflow. Only collections generated from the current scope will appear here—collections from other scopes can be accessed from their respective scope files or through the Network page.
When you click Complete Scope Analysis, the scope status will be set to "Completed." This action finalizes the scope and disables further modifications, including adding or removing suppliers or clusters, and creating new collections.
A confirmation dialog will appear, informing you that completing the scope is a final action. Once confirmed, no further edits to the scope—such as adding or removing clusters or suppliers—will be possible.
Viewing Existing Scopes
Permissions
When viewing an existing scope:
Owners of the scope may edit the selected clusters and suppliers if the status is marked as "Open".
If the scope status is "Completed", it becomes read-only. To make changes, you can duplicate the scope by copying it and modifying the new version.
Only the owner of a scope may delete it.
Scopes also display labels indicating whether or not the content is editable.
Please Note: Once a scope is created, the general input criteria (e.g., perspective, scoping period) cannot be edited. To change these, copy the scope and adjust the fields in the new file.
Key Takeaways: Strategic Risk Assessment, Smart Resource Allocation, and Regulatory Alignment
The Scoping tool in Prewave is more than a preliminary analysis step—it is a strategic framework for identifying risk and driving informed decision-making across complex supply chains.
By leveraging clustering, customizable filters, and permission-based collections, your organization can efficiently prioritize high-risk areas, reduce the burden of manual analysis, and confidently align with regulatory requirements like LkSG, CSDDD, and NTA. Scoping ensures you start your due diligence with clarity, scale, and purpose—setting the foundation for effective supply chain transparency and action.