How to use the corrective action plan feature

The EcoVadis sustainability assessment is an important step on your journey towards sustainability excellence. Your scorecard gives you a photograph that reflects your sustainability performance at the time of publication. Additionally, it indicates in detail the improvement areas for your company to work on, in order to improve your company’s performance.

To support your company’s sustainability performance 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.

Note: The information that you include in your corrective action plan tab is visible to your trading partners, but will not be checked by EcoVadis and will not impact your current scorecard. Your scorecard will only be updated after your company’s next reassessment.

1. Plan your corrective actions

Here are a few tips on interpreting a scorecard and prioritizing improvement actions that should help you to determine which issues/themes to address and improve on.

Themes and weights 

Before embarking on a corrective action plan, it is important to take note of which themes have the lowest scores and highest weight for your company. This will help you understand which themes you should prioritize for corrective actions.

• Theme scores: Environment, Labor & Human Rights, Ethics, Sustainable Procurement (e.g. if ≤ 20/100 = high risk).

• Weight (1-4): The weight for each theme is based on your company’s activity, size and location.

Getting started

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

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 example of an improvement area displayed in the corrective action plan feature.
  
  
• Information and Guidance
  To address a specific improvement area click on the Initiate button. Each improvement area contains guidance to help you better understand the improvement area. Many include How-To guides to help your organization successfully implement policies, actions and/or reporting on key topics. Learn more about the helpful resources and tools available here.

• Managing corrective actions and communicating updates
  Corrective actions can be created by proactively initiating them, or they can be requested by a trading partner. Corrective actions can be used to manage improvement, provide updates to trading partners (using the communication thread and by uploading attachments) and track activity against deadlines (set proactively or by the trading partner).
  
  Tips for effective communication

3. Reflect your corrective actions in the scorecard

If you wish to update your results as they appear on your scorecard, 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. Click here to learn more. All documents previously uploaded in your corrective action plan tab will automatically be loaded into your document library to facilitate your completion of the reassessment questionnaire.

Learn how to start a reassessment with Eva, your in-platform assistant.

1. Go to https://www.ecovadis-survey.com/app/.
2. Log in using your username (your email address) and password. A "forgot password" link is also available on the login page.
3. Click on the question mark icon in the bottom left corner.
4. Select your question from the list (e.g. Start or purchase a reassessment), or type your question into the search bar.