What is the scope of the assessment?

The scope refers to the legal entity or entities of the company that will be undergoing assessment. The possible assessment scopes are: 

• The entire group/ company;
• A specific country/region;
• A specific operational site.

For a scope to be considered for assessment, it needs to be associated with a legal entity name. 

EcoVadis’ recommendation is to assess the scope that is most directly relevant to the relationship between your company and your trading partners. This allows for a more targeted sustainability risk management and performance evaluation as many sustainability impacts (for example environmental, labour and human rights) are tied operationally to specific sites or a group of sites within a country or region. 

For this reason, assessments done at the country/ region or site level provide a much better representation of best practices and potential areas of improvement. They also allow for better collaboration between local teams on specific corrective actions when needed. In instances where there is a group-wide sustainability management program, site-level assessments provide clearer visibility and management of the implementation of the program throughout the organization. 

There are certain types of organizational and operational structure which are NOT allowed:

• Conglomerates with a commercial legal entity (eg. groups offering a variety of divisions which differ in terms of activity) 
• Business Units or Divisions without a commercial legal entity
• Purely commercial entities in manufacturing groups (e.g. sales offices, trading agents, marketing entities)
• Pure “Financial investment" holdings (eg. investment funds with a commercial legal entity)
• Product names, commercial brands and brand names
• Non-profits, NGOs, academic institutions/universities or state-owned/ governmental organizations (except those that have a commercial entity with a corresponding registered Legal Entity)

Several local operational sites may be considered under a single assessment only if they are part of a single legal entity. Otherwise, we cannot assess several sites in a single assessment. In these cases, we may proceed with separate assessments for each entity or the parent company.