Briefing an Auditor With a Candidate Site List Before a Tier-2 Visit

A tier-2 facility visit goes sideways fast when the auditor's briefing packet only has what the tier-1 supplier handed over. You get the declared smelter, the declared mill, the one tannery with a signed agreement on file. What you don't get is the processing site a mile downriver that never made it onto any supplier declaration, because no contract names it and nobody upstream had a reason to mention it.

That gap is exactly where a candidate site list earns its place in audit prep. It's not a replacement for the declared supplier list. It's the set of undeclared candidates, flagged from the physical footprint of a region (roof lines, effluent patterns, stack signatures consistent with smelting or tanning) that an auditor should at least drive past while they're already on the ground.

What actually goes in the briefing packet

An auditor doesn't need raw imagery dumped into their inbox the night before a flight. They need a short, legible brief: each candidate site's approximate location, the facility type the imagery signature suggests, how far it sits from the declared tier-1 or tier-2 site they're already scheduled to visit, and the date the imagery was captured. Four or five lines per site, not a technical report.

Pair that with whatever the declared supplier list says about who operates in that cluster. If a candidate site sits 800 meters from a declared tannery and nobody's named it, that's a line item worth the auditor's time. If it's 40 kilometers away and outside the scope of this trip, note that too and move it to next year's list.

The briefing should also say plainly what the list is not. It's a candidate, built from a physical signature, not a confirmed violation and not proof of a relationship to your tier-1 supplier. The auditor's job on site is to work out whether that candidate is actually feeding into the supply chain or just another facility that happens to share a processing type. Overstate the list's certainty in the brief and you'll send an auditor in treating a maybe as a given, which burns trust with the tier-1 supplier fast when it turns out wrong.

Timing it against the visit, not the calendar year

Candidate site lists in this space typically refresh annually, which means the list an auditor is working from could be ten months old by the time they're standing at the gate. Pull the most recent pass before you finalize the visit itinerary, not when you first scoped the trip. A site that looked active in January's imagery might have changed, expanded, or gone quiet by the time boots are on the ground in October, and the auditor should know which candidates are fresh and which are carried over from a prior cycle.

This timing question matters even more when the visit is a corrective action plan follow-up rather than a first look. If a CAP came out of a prior finding at a declared site, the auditor going back to verify closure should also be checking whether any candidate sites near that facility have shown up or dropped off the list since. A supplier closing one undeclared subcontractor doesn't mean the volume stopped moving. It might mean it moved to the site two kilometers east that wasn't on anyone's radar last time.

Build the candidate list into the same prep document as the CAP status, not a separate attachment the auditor has to remember to check. One packet, one map of what's declared, what's flagged, and what's still open from last time.

The list itself comes from an annual satellite pass over the producing region, built specifically to surface the tier-2 and tier-3 sites that no paperwork names. If your audit prep still starts and ends with the tier-1 supplier's own disclosure, Supply Chain Mapping is built for the part of the region that disclosure never covers.

Treat the candidate list as the auditor's starting map for the undeclared half of the region, not a verdict.