EcoVadis, the leading provider of business sustainability ratings, today announces the sustainable procurement impact achieved over a decade of continuous momentum by its Sector Initiative members. A Sector Initiative is a purpose-based group of companies in the same industry, facing similar ESG challenges and values, ready to commit to an ambitious agenda of sustainability value chain transformation.
EcoVadis’ Sector Initiative (SI) solution provides additional capabilities to empower industry peers and their suppliers to share scorecards more easily, as well as dashboards, industry benchmarking and analytics to accelerate their programs. This year, the SI solution has grown its global footprint to represent 12 industries, with members who have thus far collectively engaged with and rated 45,000 suppliers within the EcoVadis Network to accelerate sustainable improvement and scale positive impact across their value chains. Compared to non-members, in the last 5 years Sector Initiative members have achieved a nearly 8-point higher average EcoVadis score, a 33% higher supplier engagement rate to complete an EcoVadis assessment, and a 6% higher sharing of GHG metrics.
“Receiving disparate ESG assessments from multiple customers can be daunting for suppliers – most are redundant, asking for similar disclosures,” said Richard Eyram, chief customer officer at EcoVadis. “By joining together and aligning on EcoVadis as their common standard for sustainability assessment, Sector Initiative members and their suppliers benefit from not only a tailored assessment, benchmarks and a scorecard that is easy-to-use, they can amplify sharing and value to suppliers, as well as accessing innovative industry tools and insights that have proven to accelerate improvement.”
Sector Initiative members use EcoVadis’ sustainability rating methodology and improvement platform to promote a responsible supply base and support current and future supplier onboarding campaigns by sharing a common pool of EcoVadis scorecards and collaboration tools, such as Corrective Action Plans, e-Learning, Carbon Action Manager and AI and data mining intelligence. Members can collaborate on, track, and improve sustainability performance with their suppliers in the network, and use powerful data mining capabilities providing industry insights to guide strategy. This creates a “virtuous multiplier effect” model in which members have achieved, on average, higher EcoVadis ratings and improvement scores than organizations not involved in the program.
The EcoVadis Sector Initiative network accounts for 33% of the suppliers (i.e., rated companies) within the entire EcoVadis Network. Moreover, SI members increase their coverage of their supply base by easily connecting to suppliers through the SI pool that they were not already connected to, and thus growing their networks by more than 30% on average. Additional benefits of the Sector Initiatives’ peer sharing and collaboration include: Members have a more harmonized approach to assessing suppliers, streamlined sharing that accelerates access to more supplier scorecards, a faster improvement journey, and a best practice sharing forum. Suppliers have sector- and theme-specific capacity building, fewer redundant questionnaires, and more business opportunities.
To learn how your organization can get involved with an EcoVadis Sector Initiative and to start driving sustainable supply chain impact at scale, visit www.ecovadis.com/sector-initiatives.
