EcoVadis Platinum Medal with support from DFGE
Customer: WMF GmbH
Category: Manufacturing
Date: April 2023
WMF has been a leading global brand for cooking, drinking and dining culture for 170 years, and its products are represented in more than 120 countries. WMF employs around 6,000 people worldwide at 20 locations. Since 2016, WMF has been part of an international team of 33,000 employees as a subsidiary of the French Groupe SEB. WMF is not only known for its high quality and innovative products, but is also a pioneer in sustainability and social responsibility – these efforts have now been rewarded with an outstanding EcoVadis Platinum rating.
WMF has participated in the EcoVadis assessment for several years, documenting its sustainability performance in the areas of environment, labor and human rights, sustainable procurement and ethics. In order to further improve the documentation of WMF’s sustainability performance in the EcoVadis assessment and to create a good basis for further EcoVadis assessments, WMF worked with DFGE’s Experts to benefit from their expertise.
Corinna Spahn
Head of Corporate Communications, WMF GmbH
“We are very pleased to receive the EcoVadis Platinum Medal, which reflects our sustainability performance at WMF. With the help of DFGE’s experts, we were able to optimize our EcoVadis assessment and the documentation of our sustainability performance. Our gaps also became clearer through the project, allowing us to continuously work on further improvements. The result speaks for the successful cooperation.”
Challenge
Identification of improvement potentials in EcoVadis
In a first project step, the DFGE team reviewed WMF’s previous EcoVadis scorecards. The main objective was to identify existing gaps in the documentation of WMF’s sustainability performance. In addition, the documents of the parent company Group SEB were included in the analysis.
The team also identified which documents were not suitable for the assessment or were no longer up to date. These findings were detailed in a gap analysis template and served as the basis for further project steps.
Solution
Workshop and Action Plan
Two gap workshops followed, in which the new findings were presented to WMF’s internal CSR team. The EcoVadis questionnaire was worked through, and the identified gaps from the gap analysis were discussed. After the gap workshops, the document collection phase was initiated.
The biggest challenge was to include all domestic and foreign production sites of WMF equally and to attach globally valid documents to the assessment. DFGE experts supported the CSR team in compiling appropriate evidence of WMF’s sustainability performance and monitored the progress in weekly meetings.
Result
Successful EcoVadis participation and rating improvement
WMF has achieved its goal of improving its EcoVadis rating, ranking in the top 1% of companies assessed by EcoVadis with the Platinum Medal award. With this result, the company clearly stands out from the industry average and shines especially in the important areas of environment and labor and human rights.
At the end of the project, DFGE’s EcoVadis experts analyzed the EcoVadis rating and gave WMF’s CSR team recommendations for action on how to maintain and even improve the Platinum rating in the coming years.
