Members of Ardent Partners’ analyst team recently took a briefing from the product marketing team at EcoVadis, a Paris- and New York-based provider of corporate social responsibility (CSR) rating services for procurement and supply chain teams. Emily Rakowski, chief marketing officer, David McClintock, marketing director, and Lucas Lopez-Videla, product marketing manager were on the call for EcoVadis.

EcoVadis’s officials briefed us on a variety of topics — beginning with a general company update, a demo of EcoVadis’s recent product release, EcoVadis 10, and a demo of its forthcoming Sustainability Intelligence Suite. The following is an overview of the briefing and demonstration.

Company Update and Growth Strategy

The team shared that EcoVadis has been experiencing significant worldwide growth — in terms of company size, location, industries served, the number of customers on its roster, and the number of suppliers rated. EcoVadis now employs more than 600 people in 11 offices on six continents after expanding into Asia-Pacific in 2018 and setting up offices in Australia and Japan. The company also has more than 350 buy-side customers and has rated more than 55,000 suppliers… and, is expecting to add many more in the near-term.

EcoVadis’s growth strategy has been, in part, to target the industry leaders within the mid-market (below a billion in annual revenue). The team believes that by winning over the industry standard bearers, competitors will be more apt to follow suit. EcoVadis has also started to target their suppliers’ suppliers in order to add them to the EcoVadis’ ratings database. The company is currently building a team to expand these efforts. EcoVadis is now making a big push into the retail and financial services industries. It also recently announced a relationship with the United Nations Global Compact in which the UN will use EcoVadis’s CSR ratings to evaluate its key global partners.

EcoVadis 10: the Sustainability Intelligence Suite

The team next shared the recent round of updates to the EcoVadis Sustainability Intelligence Suite, EcoVadis 10, that it made recently. Based in part on customer feedback and an impaneled group of end users, the updated platform boasts a new dashboard with an enhanced user interface (UI), custom drill-down capability, and the ability to filter suppliers based on specific attributes, like their CSR ratings.

One key feature of EcoVadis 10, EcoVadis Ratings, provides procurement and supply chain managers with a supplier sustainability and assessment tool (“scorecard”) that measures seven management indicators across 21 criteria for four categories of risk: environment, labor and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. Today, EcoVadis Ratings relies on human analysts to collect, prepare, and analyze supplier performance data and determine a rating. EcoVadis officials plan to scale resources in order to continuously rate their growing roster of suppliers. Thus, the company is reportedly investing in augmented intelligence (AI) capabilities, like machine learning and natural language processing, to scale its ability to rate suppliers upwards of 5x current levels.

Aided by EcoVadis Ratings, users can now convert a supplier’s weaknesses into a corrective action plan. “Strengths and improvements are prioritized by what’s going to be most impactful on the score,” said David, adding that this is a guided process. Should the supplier improve its performance sufficiently, it and the buying organization can communicate this improvement to their respective communities (i.e., “this is what we as an organization value”), which can be market drivers and differentiators.

EcoVadis 10 also features an updated news aggregation and analysis tool, News 360, that scans more than a hundred thousand news sources, media sites, and databases of troubled suppliers for derogatory information — from present day through the past five years. Using a combination of English language, local language, automated translation, and human analysts, News 360 continuously monitors suppliers in EcoVadis’s database for negative news. This feeds EcoVadis’s 360 Buyer Watch and can impact supplier assessments if any derogatory information is found. Buyers can be alerted if/when this occurs; they can also click on a particular supplier’s profile to see if they have any derogatory information on file.

With EcoVadis 10, the company can integrate its supplier data and ratings into some of its customers’ procure-to-pay (P2P) and supply risk management (SRM) platforms via an updated API. EcoVadis states that it currently integrates with Pool4Tool, SAP Ariba, Jaggaer, Tradeshift, Ivalua, Coupa, and riskmethods.

Another key feature, EcoVadis Spotlight, is a digitized supplier audit management tool that enables procurement and supply chain managers to manage, soup-to-nuts, on-site supplier audits — from scheduling and logistics, to data collection, to report review, drafting corrective action plans, and integrating data collected from the auditors into those plans.

What’s Next?

EcoVadis leaders said that in the second half of this year, they intend to launch EcoVadis IQ on the Sustainability Intelligence Suite. EcoVadis IQ is a vendor risk mapping tool intended to autonomously, continuously, and intelligently scan EcoVadis’s supplier database, assess them across all 21 of its CSR measures, and map them along companies’ supply chains. The solution will pull in country-risk profiles, category-risk profiles, 360 News Watch, and EcoVadis’s own intelligence database, plus customer spend data and supplier performance data to create a holistic analysis of supplier performance and risk. The company also hopes to pull together a more compelling heat map for supplier risk, as well as to put some suppliers on watch lists to monitor them over time; and “to eventually, become predictive.”

Final Thoughts

One of the consistent themes throughout the briefing is EcoVadis’s drive to collaborate with industry partners in order to expand its ratings database of more than 55,000 suppliers. It is utilizing a series of strategies to expand the number of suppliers it currently tracks including – (1) Working with source-to-settle solution-suite providers to integrate its supplier ratings tool within those applications. (2) Working with other partners, like Dun & Bradstreet and IBM, to find new ways to expand its supplier on-boarding capabilities and reach suppliers that are not already in EcoVadis’s database. (3) Targeting their suppliers’ suppliers within the mid-market (what it calls “Tier-N”), in a collective push to scale as fast and as reliably as it can; which makes its investments in AI capabilities all the more prudent. If these strategies enable EcoVadis to maintain strong growth in its supplier database, the information within it and the intelligence based upon it become better and more valuable. This, in turn, will help the company grow its customer footprint and enable it to stay well ahead of potential competitors.

RELATED ARTICLES

EcoVadis Expands its Sustainability Intelligence Suite

Monday First Thing: EcoVadis Sustain 2019 – Ignite Change

A Conversation with Pierre-Francois Thaler, Co-CEO, EcoVadis

Tagged in: Ardent Team, Innovation, Process, Solution Providers, Strategy, Supplier Performance Management, Suppliers, Supply Risk, Technology