EcoVadis Document Guide

How to ensure you are providing the relevant

information for your assessment

Document Classification | EcoVadis Public EcoVadis 2019 V2.0 EN

Table of Contents
Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Providing Supporting Documents. . . . . . 4

Document Standards. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Assessment Scope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Company Size and Assessment. . . . . . . . . . 8

Document Preparation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Document Relevance Check. . . . . . . . . . . 10

Attaching Document.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Managing Document. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Before You Submit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Document Confidentiality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Check List. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

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Overview
The objective of the EcoVadis assessment is
to assess the quality of a company’s Corporate
Social Responsibility (CSR) management
system.

In order to rate your CSR performance,

our analysts need evidence to support
your answers in our questionnaire, i.e.
the aforesaid CSR components. Hence,
the very first and key step is to upload
corresponding documents that reflect
your company’s commitment to CSR.

Please note that documents

provided should

•• Demonstrate your company’s CSR

management system
•• Be relevant and complete
•• Relate to the corresponding
scope of the assessment

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 Providing Supporting Documents
A good CSR management system
The objective of the EcoVadis assessment
is to assess the quality of a company’s CSR
management system.
Formalized
Regularly reviewed
(annual or bi-annual)
Qualitative and/or
quantitative objectives
Pre-exist for adequate period of
time (i.e. more than 3 months)
to allow integration into the
management system.
Relevant KPIs
Reporting
Recent annual
disclosures (i.e. KPIs 35%
no more than 2 years old)
Some examples of documents that Reminders
we are looking for:
It is important to upload evidence
•• CSR management procedures to support your answers in
•• CSR/Sustainability Reports questionnaire!
•• Social Audit reports You may upload a maximum
of 55 documents.
•• HSE Policies
•• Code of Ethics/Conduct Through our expertise, we have
seen that top performers tend to
•• Employee Handbooks have consolidated reports (CSR/
•• Certificates (ISO14001, OHSAS18001, Sustainability Reports) and obtain
Policies some of the highest scores when
among others)
25% •• UNGC Communication on Progress
uploading between 8-22 documents;
a range found to be optimal.
•• Annual Reports with Integrated
Prioritise documents when
CSR section
uploading and avoid duplicates.
Actions
Relevant
40% Regularly reviewed
(annual or bi-annual)
Well described (details
on function and how they
mitigate relevant risk)
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Document Standards Documents that do not meet EcoVadis Standards:

•• Documents (commitments, actions and/or reporting)

The reliability of the documents provided is a crucial element which created solely for satisfying EcoVadis questionnaire will
allows us to quantitatively credit the information available in our not be accepted;
assessment process.
•• Direct or verbatim copying of objectives, actions or
reporting from another organization or online sources
without reasonable assurance of implementation will be
grounds for disqualification of documents;
What to remember when providing documents?
•• Extended questionnaire answers that are not
Documents up to EcoVadis Standards: management system documents.

•• Must fulfill the minimum requirements: presence of company

name, company logo, date or implementation and/or
review date;
•• Are credible, formal and fully integrated in your CSR
management system;
•• Are authentic, pre-existing and complete;
•• Are appropriate for their intended purpose;
•• Are of high quality and understandable for their target
audience;
•• Provide material content and address potential sustainability
issues.

Fake or Forged documents will be escalated

to buyers or clients

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Assessment Scope

Why is the Assessment Scope

important?
an official Commercial
•• The objective is to assess the CSR Legal Entity (LEN)
management system of an operational
site or a group of operational sites.
•• Scope should adhere to answer
in questionnaire and supporting
documentation provided.
•• Not to under or over-estimate
associated risks.

a relevant level
of operational
scope

The Assessment Scope must have:

•• a relevant level of operational scope

•• an official Commercial Legal Entity (LEN)
Assessment
Scope

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Assessment Scope
Interactions of scope levels and information credited

The CSR performance of the company under assessment could be under or overestimated if
evidence is provided solely from subsidiaries/sites and/or parent company. Therefore, under
certain circumstances, policies, actions and results from subsidiaries/sites and/or parent
company might not be fully credited due to uncertainty that the information provided is
applicable to the scope of assessment.

Assessed Subsidiaries Parent Sister

Company Sites 1 Company 2 Companies3

Policies Yes No Yes No

Actions Yes Yes No No
Results Yes No No No

Note 1: under certain conditions, policies and results may be credited at subsidiaries/sites’ level.
Note 2: under certain conditions, actions and results may be partially credited from parent level documents.
Note 3: documents from sister companies will not be credited.

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Company Size and Assessment
Are there any changes in document
expectations for extra small
companies?
We understand that smaller companies may
not have a CSR management system that
is as developed as larger companies and so
may not have as many formalized documents.
Please note that we consider extra small
companies to be companies with up to 25
employees.
For this reason, the EcoVadis assessment
questionnaires are adapted to each company
depending on their size, industry, and
location. This ensures that only issues that
are relevant for the company are taken into
account to ensure rating reliability.
Please note that for extra small companies,
we welcome non-formalized documentation.
Examples of acceptable documents include:
•• Action plans for your future CSR projects
•• Proof of employee training
•• Internal emails regarding employee awareness
•• Invoices for purchasing eco-labeled products
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Document
Before preparing supporting documentation to be uploaded, please remember
Preparation the following requirements to ensure files are taken into account:

Document
format File size Validity

1 2 3

Only the following formats will be File size of each document The most recently updated
accepted: docx, .doc, .xls, .xlsx, .pdf, cannot exceed 30MB for documents (validity period
.odt, .ott, .sxw, .stw .ods, .odp, .jpeg, uploading. for both policies and actions
.jpg, .png, .bmp, .txt, .html is 8 years while that
of reported KPIs is 2 years).

Note: It is important to ensure all

documents from previous and cur-
rent assessments are still up-to-date
Number of and within validity period.
documents Language

5 4

Maximum number of documents Documents in all languages

uploaded for each assessment is are accepted, given that they
55. We are confident that your are readily editable, e.g. MS
company is able to demonstrate Word format. It should be
the comprehensiveness of its CSR possible to copy text from
management systems with no more your document and paste
than 55 documents. that text into a separate
location.

Note: numerous documents should not

be merged into 1 document, they are to be
uploaded separately.

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Document Relevance Check
Supporting documents are key to demonstrate your company’s CSR management system. It is thus important to ensure that submitted documents
are relevant for the assessment.
Main reasons why documents are not processed during the assessment:
Not Relevant Document
Document does not demonstrate
company’s CSR management system
A. Document which does not provide
information related to company CSR
management system or not within the 21
EcoVadis assessment criteria.
B. Document which does not reflect a
structural CSR management system in place.
For example, not formalized documentation
(e.g. without company name/logo,
implementation/review date, etc), incomplete
documentation, unfilled template and/or
excerpts of large documents.
Not Relevant
Document
Invalid
submission
1 2
Not taken into consideration
C. Document prepared specifically to answer
to the EcoVadis assessment, and not included
in the CSR management system
of the company.
D. Document with CSR information but not
from the scope of assessment.
E. Document is not within the validity period.
Valid CSR Accepted
Document and Analyzed
Invalid Document
Document cannot be processed
A. Document is corrupted or falls outside
the accepted document formats.
B. Document could not be analyzed
because of its language and is not
in an editable format*.
*EcoVadis analysts are capable of analyzing documents in multiple
languages including (but not limited to) English, French, Spanish,
German and Chinese. In specific circumstances in which document
is written in some unique languages, an editable format (e.g. MS
Word format) will be required to facilitate the analysis.
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Attaching Documents
Most answers in the questionnaire require document(s) to be
attached as supporting evidence. Our CSR analyst team will
review each attached document and define if it constitutes a
valid proof of the declaration.

How to attach a document to support your answer:

1. Select an existing document to attach from Document Library

or upload a new document;

2. Indicate the page where the evidence can be found and add
any comments.

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Managing Documents
All your uploaded documents will be visible in the Document
Library that can be accessed directly from the menu in the
upper right-hand corner of the page.

Use the Document Library to:

•• View, edit or delete documents uploaded for
the assessment;
•• Check which answers each document is attached
to (Note: If a document is not attached to any answer,
it will not be considered).

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Before You Submit
How to check for missing attachments or Check & Submit page:
information: Get an overview of your progress, any unanswered mandatory
questions or missing information.
Red icon: No supporting document has been
attached to the answer;

Yellow icon: Supporting document has been

attached but without an indication of page where
evidence can be found.

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Document Confidentiality
•• Document provided will only be used for our assessment purposes. The
information you provide are kept confidential and cannot be shared without your
approval.This is contractually bound in our Terms and Conditions. Terms and Conditions

•• When uploading document, you can choose whether or not to share the
document with your customer.

•• We are fully committed to customer’s data safety, please refer to our Help Center
for more details.

•• Visit our Trust Center for the latest information regarding our quality and
information security initiatives. The latest versions of our ISO 9001 and ISO 27001
certificates are available there for review and download.

•• To comply with the applicable privacy laws, it is acceptable to obfuscate personal

information in the documents provided for assessment. This does not impact your
document validity and it will still be taken into account for the analysis.

Ensuring Data Security

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Check List
I verified that all the supporting documents to be submitted are related
to my CSR management system.

I confirmed that all the documents are credible formal and fully
integrated into my CSR management system.

I understand the scope of assessment for my company and have

submitted the documents for the relevant scope.
Copyright:

I prepared my documents in accordance to the acceptable format, file No part of this document may be reproduced, modified or distributed in any

size and the documents are deemed to be still within the validity period form or manner without prior written permission of EcoVadis.

stated.

I reviewed the admissibility criteria and provided my documents

accordingly. No warranty:

This document is intended for informational purposes only, and EcoVadis

For reassessment, I have looked over all the documents submitted does not warrant the accuracy, reliability, completeness of the information,

in my last assessment and uploaded any new documents or recently content, text, and graphics herein, and is subject to change without notice.

reviewed documents.

I uploaded all my new documents to EcoVadis platform and have

linked all documents in the library to my questionnaire answers. Limitation of liability:

In no event shall EcoVadis or its subsidiary companies be liable for any

I understand that my documents will be kept confidential and I have direct, indirect, special, incidental or consequential damages arising out of

shared all documents relevant to this CSR assessment. the use of any opinion or information expressly or implicitly contained in

this publication.

I have made sure that the documents transmitted comply with

applicable laws and regulations.

Any Questions? support.ecovadis.com

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