The background
EcoVadis is a supply chain assessment which helps companies to understand and quantify sustainability risks within their supply chain. Unlike individual questionnaires or very specific ones like CDP, EcoVadis offers a standardised approach which is able to compare the performance of companies with entirely different profiles on a rating scale from 1 (bad) to 100 (best performance). The benefit for participating buyers is that they only have little effort to request a significant number of their suppliers. Suppliers on the other hand ideally only have to fill out one questionnaire in order of fulfilling various customer’s requirements. This is due to the fact that the scorecard, which is awarded at the end of the assessment, can easily be shared with multiple customers.
All of the above is part of EcoVadis‘ unique success story. Founded in 2007, they rapidly established a leadership role on the sustainability market. Between 2016 and 2018, more than 50.000 assessments amongst 30.000 companies have been conducted and analysed in the EcoVadis Index. Those were analysed by EcoVadis now to identify trends and general performance. This analysis was then published in the risk-and-performance-report 2019.
The structure
First of all, nine sectors could be identified:
- Light / heavy / advanced manufacturing
- Food and beverage
- Construction
- Wholesale
- Transport
- Information and Communication technology
- Finance
- Legal
- Consulting
Within those, two subgroups are diversified: small and medium-sized companies (26-999 employees) and large organisations (>1000 employees).
The result
About half of the companies included in the EcoVadis index have a value of 45 or more. Since for many buyers such a score is also the basic prerequisite for further cooperation with their suppliers, this result is not surprising. The generally lowest scored theme, Sustainable Procurement, is also no big surprise. In a survey DFGE conducted amongst about 400 participants of their EcoVadis webinars, most companies also claimed to have the biggest uncertainties within this field. Therefore, DFGE also co-hosted a free webinar on how to improve the assessment performance in this field. On the opposing end, Labor and Human Rights was the theme with the strongest performance of all assessed companies.
Amongst large companies in the EcoVadis Index, the average score is 41.3 whilst the small and medium-sized companies have an average scoring of 42.1.
Generally, the trend within the four topics as well as the general assessment points upwards. This can be seen from illustration 1. This directly results in increasing demands from buyers. Also, the thresholds for the medals is increasing. For instance the gold medal only is rewarded to the best 10% of performers. Over time, companies therefore should strive for improvement to not fall behind competitors‘ performances.
Illustration 1: Sustainability Performance: Assessment Themes (Source: https://index.ecovadis.com/)
The DFGE has been supporting various companies in the EcoVadis-assessment as official partner since 2014. If you have any questions, encounter concrete problems or are just looking for support for the best performance imaginable, please contact us via or by phone on 08192-99733-20.
