Spend Matters founder, Jason Busch, was over from America attending the Paris EcoVadis Sustain 2019 event. EcoVadis works with firms on sustainability goal. This is to help to reduce risk and promote trust between trading partners. There is a worldwide team of experts, with innovative technology and a unique corporate social responsibility (CSR) assessment that covers 180 purchasing categories.
Its annual event, this year themed Ignite Change, brought together over 500 sustainability and procurement professionals to share ideas and best practice to help tackle climate, human rights and ethical challenges. EcoVadis has thousands of customers worldwide, and several appeared on stage to impart stories of CSR success.
Nestle developed a ‘Supplier Code’, which all tier 1s and upstream suppliers must sign up to whether direct or indirect. It requires all suppliers, whether of packaging, raw materials, capital equipment, in fact everything they source, to answer the key question of: “Where is it coming from and how is it made?”
The requirements for all suppliers are based on four factors: Auditing, Traceability, Farm Assessments and Value-Added Projects. All suppliers under a contracted basis are audited and assessed by independent verification firms, who assess against the likes of minimum working age, environmental conditions, H&S, women representation and many other principles; basically checking that all direct suppliers are working to the Supplier Code. All upstream suppliers have their materials traced back to the raw stage, be that to the plantation or farm, mapped by the T1s. All farms are assessed against the Responsible Sourcing Guidelines by partner organisations like ProForest and The Forest Trust. Based on assessment results, value-added projects are undertaken to make positive changes.
They ship 92m palettes a year and supplies Nestlé with 20m of those, has this year received the EcoVadis Gold rating for CSR. It has minimised its raw materials carbon footprint by 45% less than the industry norm. And because they are responding to what their customers want, in terms of raw material supply chain mapping (for example the provenance of the wood they use), certification, recycling and reducing their logistics footprint (by providing PaaS – palettes as a service!) they are providing a better service for their clients.
What the presentation clearly demonstrated was that EcoVadis is more than a sustainability platform; it has a strong focus on outcomes. And through continual assessments and supplier improvements, it has been able to apply its CSR learnings to other more general areas, including cybersecurity, data privacy and GDPR, third-party management and business continuity – but that’s a story for another day. We’ll be hearing more from Jason in the coming days on other highlights from Sustain 2019.