EcoVadis in the Press - Articles and bylines

Commitment to sustainable procurement has increased by a significant 81% over the past three years, according to a new study from EcoVadis, driven in part by a rise in executive-level support. The 2019 Sustainable Procurement Barometer report shows that just 13% of respondents cite leadership buy-in as a challenge to sustainable procurement today, compared to 24% in 2017 and 50% in 2013.

Pierre-François Thaler, co-founder and co-CEO of sustainability procurement platform EcoVadis, said compliance audits were failing to drive progress because companies needed to be pushed beyond “ticking a box” and show evidence of how sustainability and ethical requirements are met. 

To navigate a changing industry landscape, many big pharma companies are scaling up their sustainable procurement programs and collaborating with peers and even competitors to increase their depth and breadth of supply chain visibility. GlaxoSmithKline, Teva and Takeda recently established the Responsible Health Initiative (RHI), an industry group designed to leverage collaboration and technology to improve transparency, efficiency and sustainability within the global health supply chain.

The UNGC has clearly been an important international initiative for the global adoption of sustainable business practices and, arguably, a proof-point that commitment to clear and achievable objectives works. According to the UN Global Compact Performance Report by Ecovadis, organisations that have committed to the UNGC’s 10 principles perform significantly better on sustainability measures. In fact, the UNGC participants score, on average, 12 points higher compared to non-participants. The report also clarifies that small- and medium-sized businesses (29-999 employees) demonstrate better performance than larger organisations and act faster when addressing critical sustainability issues.

Bridgestone’s procurement policy proclaims that the company will use 100% sustainable materials by 2050; the company began working with CSR evaluation provider EcoVadis in 2018 to assess its suppliers’ existing sustainability practices. In 2019, Bridgestone will focus on reviewing the findings from EcoVadis’ assessments, to address immediate concerns, and to expand on its strategy for best practices in supply chain sustainability and transparency.

To facilitate the evaluation and management of supplier risk across the entire supply base, EcoVadis customers will soon be able to benefit from EcoVadis IQ, the new risk mapping tool available later this year. Based on the extensive EcoVadis database, this tool continuously screens the supply chain and maps a company’s supplier risk across all key sustainability criteria. Especially procurement, risk and compliance teams will be able to leverage these insights to inform their strategy.

Many businesses are taking a reactive, unstructured approach to fighting corruption risks, found the EcoVadis study of more than 20,000 company assessments, across 100 countries and 150 industries. This is despite the fact that all employees involved in corporate bribery can face lengthy jail terms. 

EcoVadis, a provider of sustainable procurement ratings, conducted a separate study of over 20,000 companies, examining how well they’re progressing on adopting the UN’s Global Compact Principles, which are similar but not identical to the aforementioned Guiding Principles (it gets confusing, doesn’t it?). The most telling takeaway from the EcoVadis study is that small and medium-sized companies tend to perform better on addressing CSR issues than do the large global companies, which the study attributes to the smaller companies’ ability to act faster.

The annual event has grown dramatically over the past few years, with an estimated 700 people in attendance this year. The theme of the conference was #IgniteChange and EcoVadis’ co-Founder and co-CEO, Pierre-Francois Thaler got right to the point by saying that you cannot solve exponential problems with linear solutions (and, that the problems with climate change and the environment are exponential). The size and growth of the conference is a clear indication of the interest that global businesses have in Corporate Social Responsibility (“CSR”) and Sustainability. 

“As business models across the health and pharmaceutical industries continue to evolve and overlap, it makes sense for organizations to focus on shared needs, goals and opportunities in sustainability, and act on them through the collective industry supply chain,” Pierre-Francois Thaler, co-CEO and co-founder of EcoVadis, is quoted as saying.

In 2018 the University of California adopted a policy to include sustainability as part of their RFP selection process. For solicitations over $100,000 a minimum of 15 percent of the selection criteria must be allotted to sustainability (for both goods and services). Concurrently UC is partnering with a third party to help evaluate supplier performance in the area of sustainability. EcoVadis is an international leader in this space, offering a robust system for assessing suppliers on their corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. A scorecard measures their performance in four categories: environment, labor and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. This allows agencies to compare performance in a specific commodity area and help suppliers make improvements where needed.

According to an EcoVadis procurement expert, investors, consumers, corporate executives and other organizational stakeholders all realize that corporate responsibility doesn’t just build a better world; it also drives financial value. Global businesses are committing to key sustainability objectives such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, eliminating slave labor, avoiding plastics, conserving water used in production, tapping into renewable energy sources and more.

Pierre-Francois Thaler, Paris-based co-founder and co-CEO of EcoVadis:
1) Companies in China are surprisingly more open than other countries in disclosing ESG performance because they are very reactive and business-minded
2) They understand the need and importance of external recognition of their sustainability performance to their foreign trading, business partners or clients. That is also one of the reasons why China is our fastest growing base of scorecards

The paper throws light on new cognitive sourcing concepts and standards that will be implemented in manufacturing and services industries. It also showcases the path forward as new functional dynamics come into play between the CPO, the CFO and the CSO/CCO (chief sustainability officer/chief compliance officer) in an increasingly transparent data environment.

Indirect spend often gets overlooked by businesses because the outcomes from buying those goods and services are not the company’s core product, which relies on direct spend. But the potential for lost money and increased risk is so great that businesses must find a way to manage indirect spend.

Julia Moshkin of EcoVadis points to research showing that companies that have signed up to the initiative’s 10 principles perform significantly better on driving responsibility in their supply chains

The aim at Bridgestone Group is to use “100 per cent sustainable materials” by 2050 and beyond, and last year the tyre and rubber company introduced a new procurement policy to steer it towards this end. Under a partnership it began with CSR evaluation specialist EcoVadis in 2018, Bridgestone is now assessing its suppliers’ current sustainability practices and looking at what support may be needed to improve performance.

EcoVadis, the world's most trusted provider of business sustainability ratings, has been named one of Spend Matters' 50 Providers to Know for 2019. EcoVadis was selected for its proven ratings methodology, interactive platform and expert support services that comprise its sustainability intelligence suite.

The current labor market is tight, with many countries seeing the lowest unemployment rates in decades. The U.S. and U.K. have rates staying around 4%, and the European Union overall saw 6.5% unemployment in January of this year. Given the market conditions, the race to recruit and retain top talent is competitive to say the least, and procurement and supply chain management teams are feeling the pressure — not only to hire for their own teams, but for their organizations as a whole.

EcoVadis, a provider that rates businesses on sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR), announced Tuesday that it is expanding its capabilities with the new Sustainability Intelligence Suite, which will include "predictive risk mapping, performance signals and audit management."

EcoVadis and three health and pharmaceutical companies — GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Teva, Takeda — this year announced the launch of the Responsible Health Initiative (RHI). EcoVadis, which manages the initiative, states that RHI’s mission is to bolster the use of collaboration and technology to improve the visibility, efficiency and sustainability impact of the global health supply chain.