EcoVadis is a platform that helps enterprises evaluate the environmental and social responsibility performance of their suppliers, provides improvement guidance by evaluating the CSR performance of their suppliers, helps enterprises improve their business level, and enables suppliers to have international corporate competitiveness to conduct business cooperation with top multinational enterprises. It aims to improve the performance of companies' environmental and social practices by leveraging the impact of global supply chains. It combines all organizational governance items except the quality of business operations, according to the different size and industry affiliation of the enterprise, through the online submission of data for comprehensive evaluation.

The EcoVadis audit project covers 21 standards covering 4 major themes: environment, labor and human rights, business ethics, and sustainable procurement (a total of 360 assessment questions in four sections), aiming to clearly understand the performance of corporate social responsibility.

The criteria for the scorecard issued from 1 January 2023 are as follows:

■ Platinum: Top 1% (total score between 78 and 100)

■ Gold: Top 5% (total score between 70-77 points)

■ Silver: Top 25% (total score between 59-69)

■ Bronze: Top 50% (total score between 50-58)

*No medals will be awarded if the total score is lower than 50 points, or if one of the environmental, labor and human rights, or business ethics scores is lower than 30 points, or if the sustainable theme score is lower than 25 points.

*Percentage rankings are calculated across all industries and across all companies, not by industry.

Compared with the regulations in 2022, the score in 2023 has been increased again, and it may increase year by year in the future. For enterprises, continuous improvement is necessary.

In addition to meeting the above criteria, the following requirements must be met at the time of the giving of the scorecard in order to receive a medal:

The 360° observations review the past 3 years for the topics of Environment, Labor & Human Rights and Sustainable Procurement, and the past 5 years for the topic of Business Ethics.

About EcoVadis

EcoVadis is an online corporate social responsibility CSR verification platform, which is used by many world-renowned brands as one of the important tools for supply chain risk management and control. In recent years, more and more domestic enterprises are required to participate in the EcoVadis assessment, and the EcoVadis scores are getting higher and higher every year, and new questions will be added as well. Enterprises need continuous improvement if they want to pass the assessment.

1. Brief introduction of EcoVadis:

EcoVadis aims to improve companies' environmental and social performance by leveraging the impact of global supply chains.

EcoVadis provides a collaborative platform for customers and suppliers to help companies assess the environmental and social performance of their suppliers worldwide, with suppliers involved in more than 150 business areas and located in more than 120 countries.

EcoVadis' trusted scoring methodology and use of simple monitoring tools help companies manage potential risks and drive green innovation in their global supply chain management.

EcoVadis solutions have been selected by the world's major multinational companies to audit their suppliers in more than 95 countries and regions around the world.

2. The purpose of EcoVadis audit:

EcoVadis audit is the first step in CSR monitoring; It could be a clear understanding of your company's CSR performance (ie: environment, labor and human rights, business ethics, sustainable procurement); EcoVadis audit results can help you understand where your company stands, and you can use the audit results to explain your company's CSR commitment to your business stakeholders. As more and more customers are concerned about suppliers' environmental and corporate social responsibility performance, EcoVadis Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) assessment can help you meet customer requirements.

3. Process of ecovadis evaluation:

1. Registration

If the enterprise was invited by the customer to participate in the EcoVadis audit, they must register according to the link provided in the invitation email, so that their customer would be informed of the audit progress of the enterprise at any time, the audit result of the enterprise would be automatically shared with them after the job is completed. If the enterprise had not yet received a registration email from EcoVadis, but would like to be assessed due to a client request or for internal business needs, they would have to registr on the website of EcoVadis.

During the registration process of the EcoVadis website, the enterprise needed to provide general information of the enterprise, including legal entity name, country and region, enterprise size and industry. They would prepare customized questionnaires for companies based on this information.

2. Questionnaire

When EcoVadis received and processed a company's registration request, the company would receive an automatic notification containing the company's username and a link to create a password to access the EcoVadis platform, and then the company could complete the CSR questionnaire online. They were required to provide supporting documents during the process of filling out the question-naire. Documents provided would be treated as confidential and would not be shared with business partners by default.

The time to complete the report depends on the maturity level of the corporate social responsibility performance and whether all the information required for the assessment (including documents and records) is available.

3. Expert analysis

After the enterprise submits the questionnaire and supporting documents, and records supporting evidence, the CSR analysts on the EcoVadis platform will evaluate the enterprise's answers and supporting documents. EcoVadis experts use international standards such as ISO 26000 and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Global Compact Guidelines as the basis for auditing, which may take six to eight weeks, depending on the complexity of the company's submission and the number of documents submitted.

4. Results

Once the company's scorecard released, the company would receive an email notification,  the company can log in to the EcoVadis website to view the analysis results and scorecard. If the company assessed at the client's invitation, the business's scorecard could instantly shared with the client. As long as the scorecard was valid, subsequent sharing requests can be fulfilled through ecovadis website. It should be noted that the scorecard was valid for 12 months from the date of issue, the company needed to re-apply for assessment after the scorecard expires.