IQ Plus Enhances EcoVadis' Predictive Intelligence With Automated Sustainability Data Mining Capabilities

PARIS and NEW YORK, December 16, 2022 /3BL Media/ - With organizations finding it difficult to gain complete visibility on the sustainability risks of their trading partners as supply chains grow increasingly complex, EcoVadis announces it has added AI and data mining enhancements to its market-leading predictive intelligence solution.

Companies require more intelligence and due diligence capabilities to help them efficiently comply with an evolving regulatory and risk landscape. IQ Plus addresses this need by providing organizations with immediate, broad visibility across their supply base. In addition to the existing country, industry and procurement intrinsic risk factors, IQ Plus expands each risk profile with supplier-specific insights on their transparency across all sustainability dimensions. This provides an even richer mapping of an organization’s entire supply base for environmental, social and ethical risks and opportunities.

The next evolution of IQ Plus bolsters EcoVadis’ purpose-led mission to influence every business decision with sustainability intelligence. The new advancements are a result of a strategic acquisition of sustainability data mining company ecotrek earlier this year, which followed a $500M investment that raised EcoVadis’ status as one of the business sustainability sector’s first “unicorns”.

“We are entering a new era in business sustainability transformation where regulatory requirements demand broad transparency and deep risk insights across the value chain,” said Madhur Aggarwal, chief product officer, EcoVadis. “With data mining and AI powered innovation, we aim to give our customers the confidence to accelerate their journey, stay ahead of their industry and play a leading role in the sustainability transition.”

Now available worldwide, IQ Plus was market-tested in Germany where it is helping companies quickly address requirements of the upcoming German Supply Chain due diligence law (known as “LkSG” in German). Key new functionality includes:

• Company DocScan: Enhancements to the predictive risk level calculation for a supplier being profiled. This includes an AI-based automated scan and cataloging of supplier-specific and publicly available sustainability documents from the web related to their business. Documents are scanned and mapped against the EcoVadis methodology, producing a ScanRisk factor used in the predictive risk score. The “no touch” automated process scales to tens of thousands of suppliers within hours or days, informing risk insights across the entire supply chain.
• Live News Monitoring: Built on the same engine as EcoVadis 360 Watch in the ratings methodology, Live News Monitoring scans thousands of data sources across the web including news feeds, environmental and human rights monitoring, and key sanction and watch-lists for incidents related to an organization’s suppliers. Procurement teams are quickly informed of items that may impact their exposure on key sustainability criteria across their supply base.

IQ Plus is a core product in the EcoVadis Sustainability Intelligence Suite. It allows companies to map and monitor risks and opportunities across the entire value chain and identify priority partners to be rated. The Sustainability Ratings product then empowers direct supplier engagement with benchmarks, scorecards to identify improvement areas, a collaborative Carbon Action Module, and is complemented by the EcoVadis e-learning Academy to help advance supplier sustainability performance. The Suite is built on the core EcoVadis methodology refined over 15 years, aligned to international standards and emerging regulations, and is accompanied by a full set of program management and onboarding services.

“IQ Plus represents not only a swift combination of ecotrek data mining technologies with EcoVadis solutions, but a powerful integration of teams,” added Jolene Ernesti, previously co-founder at ecotrek, now focused on IQ Plus data and methodology. “This combined team - whose sum is far greater than the individual parts - can drive innovation faster than ever, helping accelerate our customers’ journeys to compliance, resilience and beyond to positive impact at scale across their value chains.”

The IQ Plus module is on track to profile and map more than one million suppliers across more than 150 enterprise customers’ procurement portfolios this year. To learn more about how EcoVadis IQ Plus helps organizations better understand their sustainability risks and opportunities, visit https://ecovadis.com/solutions/iq/ .

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About EcoVadis

EcoVadis is a purpose-led company whose mission is to provide the world's most trusted business sustainability ratings. Businesses of all sizes rely on EcoVadis’ expert intelligence and evidence-based ratings to monitor and improve the sustainability performance of their business and trading partners. Its actionable scorecards, benchmarks, carbon action tools, and insights guide an improvement journey for environmental, social and ethical practices across 200 industry categories and 175 countries. Industry leaders such as Johnson & Johnson, L’Oréal, Unilever, LVMH, Bridgestone, BASF and JPMorgan are among the 100,000 businesses that collaborate with EcoVadis to drive resilience, sustainable growth and positive impact worldwide. Learn more on ecovadis.com, Twitter or LinkedIn.

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