Why bother with EcoVadis?

Your inbox pings...it's another request from a customer to fill in an ESG questionnaire. You resist the urge to write "please see our latest impact report"... or to accidentally move the whole email to trash. This is a customer email after all and the customer is king. The irony hits home. Haven't you asked your own suppliers to fill in a similar form only last quarter (and aren't the responses still sitting un-analysed in a spreadsheet somewhere)?

If this even sounds vaguely familiar, then EcoVadis is a tool you should consider. Designed as a B2B assessment, EcoVadis has been used by over 150,000 companies to measure their impact, share their performance, and identify opportunities. You can use this tool to rate your own performance and share it with your customers, as well as asking your own suppliers to complete the assessment and share their scorecards with you.

What is it, in a nutshell?

EcoVadis is a questionnaire/assessment covering four themes: Environment, Labour & Human Rights, Ethics and Sustainable Procurement. You can connect to your 'trading partners' via a directory and share your results with each other. It can be used as a tool to identify risks, as well as a tool to identify and track improvements. Depending on your score and the performance of other EcoVadis users, you may be awarded a medal which you can share with your customers. The assessment looks at policies, measures, reporting and some more complicated elements around third party audits, endorsements and media coverage.

What features do we love?

• Consistency - Though your assessment is customised to your industry, size and location, you are broadly getting assessed against the same standards as all of the other companies in your value chain using the assessment. This means that you can interpret the results of your suppliers with greater ease (having been through a similar process yourself).

• Efficiency - You submit for reassessment every year and once you have submitted the questionnaire your rating is usually completed within 6-8 weeks (during this time you are not asked for any additional evidence or clarifications). From a project management perspective, we also love that you can reuse evidence for multiple questions and across multiple years.

• Dynamic rating - Okay, this one is a love/hate relationship. Though your score will always be out of 100, your medal is awarded based on your score relative to other companies in the database! So love because it pushes you to be better each year assuming everyone else is doing the same. Hate because we love giving our clients confidence that their hard work will lead to certain results. BUT, it does add an element of surprise that we don't see with B Corp certification.

• Clarity - The questionnaire evolves and even though it can be a little daunting to navigate at first, the system does flag when new questions have been added. The scoring system is complex but if you spend time in the assessment you can find the scoring principles laid out with advice on how to improve your evidence quality.

• Insights - EcoVadis puts all of that data to good use providing insights in blog posts, reports and whitepapers. On a smaller scale, the platform can also be used to exchange data between you and your trading partners, so you can share as little as your score or as much as your exact GHG footprint and tonnes of waste.

What are the benefits of filling out yet another assessment?

We are seeing more and more supply chain partnerships require third-party sustainability ratings/reviews. Because EcoVadis is so widely adopted in the B2B setting (3,000 assessments tool place in the UK alone in 2024), the hope is that you will be able to use one assessment to demonstrate your progress to multiple partners, as well as relying on insights from EcoVadis to manage the impact of your own suppliers.

When you work to improve your own score on EcoVadis, you can then adapt those learnings as opportunities for capacity building with your suppliers (in other words, when you get better, you can share those learnings with your suppliers and help them improve as well).

Also (hopefully) like the sustainability team in your organisation, sustainability assessments aren’t siloed.  EcoVadis can be used as a tool to meet the supplier engagement requirements of the Human Rights and Environmental Stewardship & Circularity new B Corp V2.1. In the same way B Corp certification can be used as evidence for labour and human rights certification in the EcoVadis assessment. Showing that rather than just adding extra work, sustainability assessments can work together to progress the same goal of reducing the negative and increasing the positive impact of your organisation.

Want to learn more? Get in touch!