Transforming Global Ethical Trade Audits into a Scalable Digital Platform

Sedex is one of the world's largest platforms for ethical trade, used by thousands of companies to manage responsible sourcing and supplier compliance.

However, its most important process — SMETA audits — was still largely fragmented across documents, disconnected systems, and manual reporting workflows.

I led product design for the digital transformation of the SMETA audit ecosystem, helping turn a complex compliance process into a scalable product platform used by buyers, auditors, and suppliers worldwide.

Rather than simply digitising existing forms, we re-framed the challenge as a system redesign of the audit lifecycle.

The result was a unified platform that reduced audit submission timelines from roughly 45 days to around 10 days, improved collaboration between stakeholders, and laid the foundation for analytics and automation across the global ethical trade ecosystem.

Strategic Insight

The core insight was that SMETA audits were never designed as a product. They were designed as compliance documentation.

Over time, the ecosystem had grown into a patchwork of spreadsheets, PDFs, separate portals, and manual submissions. Each actor — auditors, suppliers, and buyers — interacted with the system differently, often duplicating work across tools.

Reframing the Problem

Instead of thinking in terms of forms and documents, we reframed the problem around:

• Structured data
• Shared workflows
• Lifecycle visibility
• Collaboration across actors

This shift changed the project from digitising paperwork to creating a platform for ethical trade intelligence.

Context & Opportunity

Sedex is widely used by global retailers and manufacturers to monitor supply chain ethics, labour standards, and environmental practices. The SMETA audit framework is considered the gold standard for ethical trade audits worldwide.

However, the digital experience around SMETA was fragmented.

Auditor Pain Points

Suppliers struggled to understand audit outcomes. Buyers lacked visibility into supplier risk and compliance trends.

Operational Consequences

"Transform SMETA from a documentation process into a data platform for ethical trade insights."

Discovery

Discovery focused on understanding the real audit ecosystem, not just the documented process.

Methods

Research findings were synthesised into themed clusters — from audits taking too long and trust issues, to buyer visibility gaps and data duplication — revealing systemic problems across the entire audit ecosystem.

Affinity mapping of discovery findings

Key Patterns

This discovery reframed the problem: The challenge was not improving one interface. It was designing the product infrastructure for audits at scale.

Early hand-drawn flow diagrams mapped the complex interactions between auditors, suppliers, and buyers — helping the team understand the full dispute and corrective action lifecycle before designing digital solutions.

Early workflow sketches for dispute and corrective action flows

Product Strategy

The transformation strategy focused on three core principles.

Product Positioning Shift

Detailed user flow diagrams mapped multi-path scenarios like supplier onboarding, where address matching, site linking, and membership status created complex branching logic across stakeholder roles.

Supplier onboarding flow with intelligent address matching

Product System & Experience

The redesigned product focused on unifying the audit workflow into a single digital environment.

The unified audit workspace replaced fragmented spreadsheets with a single view where auditors could schedule, track, and manage audits with clear status indicators and reviewer assignments.

Unified audit workspace with scheduling and reviewer assignment

Audit findings became structured, actionable data — each with detailed observations, root causes, and a collaborative corrective action workflow enabling auditors to accept or reject supplier responses.

Structured findings with corrective action review workflow

Impact

My Contribution

As Product Strategy & Design Consultant, I:

• Identified the strategic opportunity to transform SMETA audits from fragmented documentation into a structured digital platform
• Led discovery workshops and research with buyers, suppliers, and auditors, uncovering 60+ workflow frictions across the audit lifecycle
• Reframed the product challenge from document digitisation to system design for multi-stakeholder collaboration
• Designed the core digital audit workflow, structuring how findings, corrective actions, and audit data move across the system
• Defined the conceptual model for turning audit reports into structured data that could support analytics and automation
• Built Sedex's first design system and UI component library, enabling multiple product teams to contribute to the platform
• Facilitated workshops and alignment sessions across product, engineering, and compliance teams to translate complex audit requirements into scalable product architecture

Key Learnings