How to use the Corrective Action Plan feature

Your EcoVadis sustainability and carbon scorecards reflect your performance at the time of publication. Additionally, they indicate in detail the improvement areas for your company to work on.

To support your company’s improvement, EcoVadis offers all rated companies access to the online Corrective Action Plan feature, which enables you to:

• Build improvement plans online;
• Communicate planned and completed corrective actions with your trading partners;
• Receive feedback from your trading partners.

Depending on your subscription 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 but will not be checked by EcoVadis and will not impact your current scorecards. Your scorecards can only be updated after your company has completed a reassessment.

1. Plan your corrective actions

Here are a few tips on interpreting scorecards and prioritizing corrective actions. Before embarking on a corrective action plan, it is essential to take note of the following: 

For the sustainability scorecard, go to the Visualize your score section. Here, you'll see the impact of each theme and indicator on your score, along with the scoring scale for each indicator within a theme. This overview can help identify areas that may require attention, reinforcing the priority levels designated for each improvement area.

For the carbon scorecard:

• Weight of the carbon management stages: Commitment, Actions, and Reporting;
• Priority of the improvement areas.

Getting started

To get started on your corrective Action Plan, open the Corrective Action Plan tab in the My Performance section on your platform.

Monitoring your corrective actions

The Corrective Action Plan tab lists corrective actions based on scorecards by default. Use the Theme dropdown to list corrective actions by the sustainability scorecard (themes) or carbon scorecard (carbon management stages).

2. Create and communicate your corrective actions

• Improvement areas and priorities
  In the Corrective Action Plan feature, you will find a list of all improvement areas identified by EcoVadis during the assessment, listed in order of priority (high, medium, and low). Below is an improvement area displayed in the corrective action plan feature.

• Information and Guidance
  To view the details of a specific improvement area, click on the button View. Each improvement area contains guidance to help you better understand the improvement area. Click “Start” to turn the Improvement Area into a Corrective action. Many include How-To guides to help your organization successfully implement policies, actions, or reporting on key topics. Learn more about the resources and tools to better understand your sustainability scorecard results.
• Managing corrective actions and communicating updates
  Corrective actions can be created by proactively initiating them, or a trading partner can request them. Corrective actions can be used to manage improvement, update trading partners (using the communication thread and uploading attachments), and track activity against deadlines (set proactively or by the trading partner).
  
  Note: If your trading partner requests improvements, you may have the option to message them directly. This is a useful tool for keeping your partner informed about your progress. However, please be aware that the messages you send through this option are not received or analyzed by EcoVadis.

Tips for effective communication

Document privacy in the Corrective Action Plan

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.

For documents that have already been uploaded, you can change the sharing settings in the Document Library (Documents tab next to the Corrective Action Plan).

The Corrective Action Plan is in read-only mode (blocked) in a few use cases (In these cases, the CAP page is viewable, but no actions can be taken):

• While you have a questionnaire open and are in answering status

• While the assessment is in analysis and the scorecard has not been published yet

3. Reflect your corrective actions in scorecards

If you wish to update your scorecard results, you can do so only by proceeding to a reassessment. If you decide to undergo a reassessment, you will be able to update your answers and add additional documents. Our team will then perform an entirely new analysis of your company. For optimum results, we recommend getting rated once a year. Learn more about available reassessment. All documents previously uploaded in your corrective action plan tab will automatically be uploaded into your document library to facilitate your completion of the reassessment questionnaire.

You can access your corrective actions even if your subscription or scorecard has expired.