Strengthening Business Relationships While Making an Impact

February 8, 2022 EcoVadis EN

The fast-evolving role of sustainable practices across a turbulent, global economic and political landscape over the last 20 years has shown us multiple examples of sustainability risks in day-to-day practices, and these problems are rising. Environmental, human rights or ethical disasters can happen in any industry, anywhere, including developed countries. Demands for sustainable business practices are rising, and stakeholders are putting immense pressure on businesses to be more transparent and high-performing.

At EcoVadis, we’ve partnered with over 750 multinational companies, and we’ve witnessed a growing number of CPOs, Executives and Procurement professionals making sustainability a critical requirement for doing business with trading partners. This means more prospects and customers will question your sustainability practices. Simply put, having the lowest prices, the highest quality services and products, and the shortest delivery times are not enough to retain or gain business with customers and prospects. Can you show them what they need to see?

Going Beyond Compliance

But looking beyond compliance requirements, why are companies taking action on sustainability?

At first, companies are typically seeking to manage risks - particularly brand reputation, disruptions to revenue, and compliance with local or global regulations (avoid fines). But they quickly realize the potential to reduce costs, both transactional and operational, access lower cost of capital via sustainability-linked loans, and increasingly look to sustainability as a strategy to support business growth. 

Sustainability initiatives support not only cost and risk benefits but also -- with the right indicators and tools to measure and drive performance -- a much broader value creation opportunity. Advanced sustainability performance enables any company to demonstrate their capacity to innovate, and thus empower them -- along with their customers - to differentiate in their current markets, or access new categories or market segments of sustainable products and services.

How We Help

Sustainability is not new and the business mindset about this topic has evolved from minimizing risks to creating shared value for all stakeholders. Moving towards sustainability is not about achieving perfection. It is about making incremental improvements along your journey, and this is where our collaborative solution can help.  

In  partnership with EcoVadis, you can:

  • Improve Buyer-Supplier Relationships: hear why these executives believe working with EcoVadis has improved their business. 

  • Benchmark Your Performance Against an Industry Standard: with EcoVadis, you’ll be able to benchmark your performance against your competitors, using the same scoring system. Check out our 2021 Global CSR and Performance Index to explore regional, country, and industry performance comparisons. 

  • Enjoy Learning Opportunities: our internal teams are continuously delivering best practices webinars and sustainability testimonials from peers to accelerate your improvement. 

  • Build Your Capacity: we launched the EcoVadis Academy, our digital learning hub providing customers with e-learning courses to help them understand and improve their sustainability management practices. 

  • Access A Network of EcoVadis-accredited Partners: our partners can help you with the EcoVadis assessment in order to optimize your response and improve your sustainability performance and practices.

  • Amplify Your Sustainability Success: our communication tools, available in our premium plan, allow you to showcase your success so your brand stands out. 

  • Get New Scorecard Sharing Capabilities: You can now share your scorecard directly (available in our premium and select plans) with your customers and prospects -- even outside the EcoVadis network -- saving you time in answering questionnaires, and boosting your credibility to grow your company.  

Want to know more about how we have helped over 85,000 organizations to measure, improve and communicate their performance?

Drop us a line -- we'll be happy to help. 

About the Author

EcoVadis EN

EcoVadis is a purpose-driven company whose mission is to provide the world's most trusted business sustainability ratings. Businesses of all sizes rely on EcoVadis’ expert intelligence and evidence-based ratings to manage risk and compliance, drive decarbonization, and improve the sustainability performance of their business and value chain. Its AI-powered risk mapping, actionable scorecards, benchmarks, carbon action tools, and insights guide a resilience and improvement journey for environmental, social and ethical practices across 200 industry categories and 175 countries.

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