IN SUMMARY
Most LCA programmes stall at the same point: the supplier data request. Teams either ask for too much and get nothing back, or collect data with no governance and can’t defend it under review.
The most common failure is scope creep, asking suppliers for every data point upfront rather than starting with a minimum viable request and targeting quality improvements only where they change the result.
Data collected without a submission and approval trail cannot be defended under third-party critical review, regardless of its quality. Governance needs to be defined before collection begins, not after.
Supplier data collected for one reporting cycle is routinely rebuilt from scratch for the next. Naming conventions, storage structure, and mapping logic determine whether data is reusable or disposable.
Why supplier data is the real bottleneck in LCA
After helping teams build supplier data programmes across battery and critical mineral supply chains, one pattern keeps appearing: the model is rarely the constraint. The data is. A life cycle assessment is only as credible as the primary data behind it. For the stages that matter most — battery manufacturing, cathode and anode precursor production, metal refining — secondary database values aren’t enough to satisfy an OEM customer, a third-party critical reviewer, or the EU Battery Regulation. You need site-specific data from the companies actually running those processes. And that is where most programmes stall.
The three failures that stall most programmes
Asking for too much, too early. The instinct is to send suppliers a comprehensive data request covering every input and output. Response rates collapse. Suppliers see a forty-field spreadsheet and deprioritise it. A focused, staged request gets answered; an exhaustive one gets ignored.
Collecting data with no governance. Data that arrives by email, gets pasted into a model, and has no record of who submitted it or when cannot be defended. When a reviewer asks where a number came from, “a supplier sent it last year” is not an answer that survives critical review.
Building for one cycle instead of many. Most teams treat supplier data collection as a one-off exercise tied to a single report. The next reporting cycle arrives and the same data is requested, reformatted, and re-modelled from scratch — because nothing was structured for reuse.