Ecovadis is a supplier scorecard. My company does not issue Ecovadis to our suppliers. However, we are a supplier to our customers and many of our customers request that we support and provide information through Ecovadis as a supplier to larger case manufacturers.
Expensive and not very useful
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
It definitely has not.
What is most valuable?
To be honest, I do not find Ecovadis valuable at all.
What needs improvement?
There are a few things that need improvement, and one of them is definitely their customer service, although they have been working on it.
Additionally, I work in the transportation sector. More specifically, I work in over-the-road transportation. It is very obvious that this scorecard was initially designed for manufacturing. Many of the questions that are asked do not pertain to my industry, and therefore, we cannot answer in the way that they require and we don't get points for certain things. And I will say, I mentioned that I'm filling out this survey for this year. And it Yes. has improved slightly for the transportation sector, so that's good news but there are still massive gaps.
I do all of our non-financial disclosures. I do sustainability indices, MSCI, ISS, etc. The one thing that all of those do is they allow you to see, in one way or another, how you peer benchmark. So they help you see how you're doing compared to similar companies. Ecovadis does not provide that. If we could see how our peers were doing and what their scores were, then we could use that with senior management, and we could use that with the board of directors. And that would drive motivation internally to compete with our peers. I think it could be a competitive tool that Ecovadis could harness to make its users do better. Outside of that, they need to further improve how they measure over-the-road transportation within their current system.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Ecovadis for five years.
How are customer service and support?
Over the years, there have been a lot of gray areas when you're filling out surveys because you may not understand the specific question or there may not be enough information. When you reach out to their help area, typically, it's in a different country, and it can take anywhere from two to three days to a week to two to get feedback, and it's ridiculous.
They also limit the amount of supporting documentation you can upload, and they require supporting documentation for every single question, but they've limited you to only fifty-five links or documents. Therefore, sometimes, if you have a lot of stuff going on, you can't even supply them with all the information they need to rank you.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
How was the initial setup?
There's no deployment since you just have an individual who's a point of contact, who gathers information and fills out an online survey. I would say the platform is relatively straightforward. However, the amount of information that you have to collect across your business is highly extensive.
What was our ROI?
Zero.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I think that the pricing structure is terrible. In our company, we do not have a choice whether we want to use Ecovadis or not since the company we do business with has already paid for it and requires us to use and purchase it as well. It cost us about twenty-five thousand dollars last year.
What other advice do I have?
There are two sides to this because you have the company that uses Ecovadis for its supply chain. In that case, there may be benefits if you're trying to screen your supply chain for ESG metrics. But if your company is the supplier, I think there's very little value in Ecovadis.
Overall, I would rate it a three out of ten.
