Your EcoVadis Sustainability Scorecard and Carbon Scorecard reflect your company’s performance at the time of publication. They also highlight improvement areas for your company to address.
To support your company’s improvement efforts, EcoVadis provides all rated companies with access to the Corrective Action Plan feature. This tool enables you to:
- Develop improvement plans online
- Share planned and completed corrective actions with your trading partners
- Receive feedback from trading partners
Depending on your subscription level and available scorecards, you can initiate corrective actions based on sustainability and carbon-related improvement areas. The information you include in your Corrective Action Plan is visible to your trading partners. However, EcoVadis does not review this information, and it does not impact your current scorecards. Your scorecards can only be updated if your company undergoes a reassessment.
Useful definitions
Corrective Action Plan (CAP): a dedicated section of the EcoVadis platform where Rated companies manage their corrective actions. It’s the only place where corrective actions can be tracked and updated.
Scorecard Improvement Area (IA): an area identified during an EcoVadis assessment that a company needs to address to improve its sustainability or carbon performance. Each IA is linked to one or more themes or indicators and may appear in both the Sustainability Scorecard and the Carbon Scorecard.
Corrective Action (CA): a measure taken to address and resolve an identified issue. There are two types of corrective actions:
- Scorecard-based: when a scorecard is published, all scorecard improvement areas automatically generate a Not started corrective action. Rated companies can manage these actions in the Corrective Action Plan.
- General improvement: used to request specific improvements that are not related to a scorecard improvement area and can have any title, priority, theme or indicator. It can be created by both Requesting companies and Rated companies.
Planning corrective actions
Not all corrective actions have the same impact on your scorecard. Review your scorecard to prioritize which corrective actions to address first.
Sustainability scorecard
Go to Visualize your score section. There, you’ll see how each theme and indicator affects your score, along with the scoring scale or each indicator within a theme. This overview will help you identify areas that need improvement.
In this example, the Environment and Labor & Human Rights themes have the greatest impact on your score, along with the Policies and Measures indicators. A good starting point is to focus on corrective actions related to these areas.
Let's look at the Environment theme and Policies indicator. Expanding the scorecard section reveals the following improvement areas:
Here, one of the first corrective actions to address is the High priority “Inconclusive documentation on environmental policies”. Learn more about the resources and tools to better understand your sustainability scorecard results.
Carbon scorecard
The Carbon scorecard follows a similar approach, where each of the three strengths and improvement areas has a different impact on your Carbon Management Level:
Since the Reporting area’s weight is 50%, you will want to address the High priority corrective actions first, such as “Consider establishing a corporate level inventory to monitor GHG emissions in accordance with GHG protocol or other GHG accounting standards” or “Seek to monitor GHG emissions for the entire scope”.
Working on Corrective Action Plan
Once your scorecard is published, all of its improvement areas for Sustainability and Carbon are automatically assigned a Not started status.
Understanding corrective actions
In this section, you can find out the details of each corrective action. Keep in mind that your Requesting companies can view this information, except the number of requests.
Each corrective action contains five columns:
- Priority: measured by the impact on your scorecard based on each theme and indicator associated with the corrective action. For example, a high-priority corrective action for a high-impact theme or indicator carries more weight than a high-priority corrective action for a low-impact theme or indicator.
- Corrective Action: the explanation of the improvement area.
- Requests: the number of Requesting companies that asked you to work on this corrective action.
- My due date: a date you can set yourself. If it has passed, it will be displayed in red.
- Status: indicates the progress you have made, such as Not started, In progress, Completed, or Archived. You can change its status as many times as needed.
If there is at least one request from a Requesting company to work on a corrective action which is not assigned to Not started or Archived, it will be highlighted in red.
If you archive a corrective action, it will be automatically moved to the Archived corrective actions list at the bottom of the table.
Understanding corrective action details
Once you expand a corrective action, this is what you will see:
- Title: the same title as the scorecard improvement area.
- Theme and indicator: information about which theme and indicator it belongs to, whether it's a Sustainability scorecard, Carbon, or both. Each corrective action can have more than one theme and one indicator.
- Status: indicates the progress you have made, such as Not started, In progress, Completed, or Archived. You can change its status as many times as needed by clicking on Update status.
- Description: most corrective actions have a detailed explanation about how to address a corrective action, including helpful links and relevant EcoVadis Academy courses. Keep in mind that not all corrective actions have this section.
Trading partner requests
Each one of your partners can send you requests for specific corrective actions. Each trading partner can only see their own request. They cannot see other companies’ requests.
A trading partner request contains:
- Name of the company (mandatory)
- Requested due date (optional) - partners can set a deadline for you to complete a corrective action
- Message (optional) - partners can add a message to their request. You can also chat with them here by sending them replies.
Action plan
In this section, you can describe how you plan to address a specific corrective action. While this section is completely optional, we encourage you to fill it out so that your trading partners can see what steps you will take moving forward.
- Assigned to: write the name of the person or the department assigned to work on a corrective action
- Due date: fill in the due date when it’s supposed to be completed
- Description: explain what steps will you take to resolve this corrective action or why you decided not to pursue it
You can only edit this section when a corrective action’s status is In progress.
Documents
In this section, you can upload new documents that can help you address a particular corrective action. Keep in mind that this functionality looks different, depending on your subscription plan.
Basic subscription plan
If you have the Basic subscription plan, you can upload documents which will be added to your Document library. However, you will need to link them to the questionnaire manually during the next reassessment.
Premium subscription plan or higher
If you have the Premium subscription plan or higher, you will be able to see which question from the questionnaire relates to your corrective action, including a list of possible answer statuses and a breakdown of what documents were rejected, and why.
You will also be able to upload new documents and link them to a specific answer. This document will be added to your Document library and will be used in your next reassessment.
Document privacy
When you add a new document, you can set who it will be shared with. By default, it is set to private, but you can also make it visible to your trading partners.
To change the sharing settings for uploaded documents, go to your Document library located in the Documents tab next to the Corrective Action Plan.
How to start addressing a corrective action
- Choose which corrective action you want to address
- Change the Status to In progress
- Add a description and a due date in the Action plan. This is optional, but we encourage you to fill it out so that your trading partners can see what steps you will take moving forward.
- Upload new documents listed in the corrective action’s details
- Change the Status to Completed
Your trading partners will see your progress, except the documents you uploaded and marked as “Private”.
Exporting your Corrective Action Plan
If you have a Premium subscription or higher, you can export an Excel version of your Corrective Action Plan by clicking on the Export button on the top right.
The export includes a breakdown of all the corrective actions in your Corrective Action Plan, based on the filters you’ve applied. For example, if the “High priority” filter is enabled, only the High priority corrective actions will be exported.
Keep in mind that the export is for reading purposes only. In order to work on your Corrective Action Plan, you need to use the platform itself.
General improvement
Requesting general improvements gives you the ability to create custom corrective actions.
There, you can create a custom Sustainability corrective action and give it a title, priority, theme, indicator, add details and upload documents. Keep in mind that this corrective action will be visible to all of your trading partners.
More tips and strategies
Change status to In progress as soon as you start working on it
Even if you’re in the process of gathering documentation, you should change your corrective action status to In progress. That way, your trading partners know you’re already addressing the issue and actively working towards improvement.
Archive corrective actions you’re not planning to address
If there are corrective actions you don’t want to address, set it to Archived. When you leave a corrective action as Not started, it might signal that you’re planning on working on it in the future.
Provide details for the action plan
Once you start working on a corrective action, add information to the action plan to provide more context to your trading partners. You should do this whether or not you plan on addressing a corrective action.
Frequently communicate corrective action updates
Once a trading partner requests a corrective action, you can start using the chat feature to discuss the request, update them on your progress, or provide them with any other details you feel are important.
How the Corrective Action Plan affects your scorecard
To update your scorecard results, you need to complete a reassessment. Only then you will be able to update your answers and add more documents. Once you request a reassessment, our team will start a completely new analysis of your company.
All the documents you’ve uploaded to the Corrective Action Plan will be automatically uploaded into your Document library to help you with the reassessment questionnaire. Even if your subscription or scorecard has expired, you will be able to access your corrective actions.
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