EcoVadis Powers Railsponsible, its Third Sustainable Procurement Collaboration, Providing Supplier CSR Ratings to the Railway Industry

PARIS and NEW YORK, March 11, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- EcoVadis announces the launch of Railsponsible, an industry initiative to drive sustainability throughout the railway supply chain. Six companies in the railway industry -- Alstom Transport, Bombardier Transportation, Deutsche Bahn, Knorr Bremse, Nederlandse Spoorwegen ("NedTrain") and SNCF -- participated in the launch as founding members of Railsponsible on March 4th in Utrecht, The Netherlands.

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The founding members signed the Railsponsible Charter, committing to a vision of high standards for suppliers across Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) criteria of environmental, social issues, and ethics. The Railsponsible mission is to embrace continuous improvement, share best practices, drive common understanding across the industry, and to use common tools to create efficiencies. 

To this end, Railsponsible selected the EcoVadis Supplier Sustainability Ratings Platform as the standard set of tools and processes to assess, monitor and improve supplier CSR performance.

"Along with our partner BSR, EcoVadis initiated this effort because we saw the opportunity for four of our existing clients (Alstom, Deutsche Bahn, NedTrain, and SNCF) to join with their other industry peers to realize similar synergies as our other collaborations," said Pierre Francois Thaler, co-CEO of EcoVadis. "On one hand, procurement teams face challenges such as finding reliable sustainability indicators in a myriad of standards and regulations, and scales across global supply chains. On the supplier side, they are faced with multiple duplicative surveys and little guidance on improvements. This industry collaboration, combined with the EcoVadis platform, solves these challenges with a universal CSR scorecard rating and sharing system."

Railsponsible is the third industry vertical initiative powered by EcoVadis, after Together for Sustainability for the chemical industry, and E-Tasc in the Telecom/ICT sector.

"In addition to network efficiencies such as up to 90% onboarding rate and over 80% cost savings, they get reliable CSR scorecards that are 100% actionable, and can be integrated via API," elaborated Thaler. "EcoVadis ratings are being used for example as criteria for RFI/tenders, thresholds for supplier recognition and innovation programs, and is guiding over 70% of suppliers to improve their sustainability score upon second evaluation."

The Railsponsible initiative, which is facilitated by BSR, is open to all railway operators and companies across the industry value chain. Members will kick off the first common supplier assessment campaigns this month.

To learn more about Railsponsible, please visit www.railsponsible.org, or email [email protected].

About EcoVadis
EcoVadis operates the first collaborative platform providing sustainability ratings and performance improvement tools for global supply chains. The platform delivers simple and reliable supplier sustainability scorecards covering 150 purchasing categories, 110 countries, and 21 CSR indicators. More than 20,000 companies use EcoVadis to reduce risk, drive innovation and foster transparency and trust between trading partners. Connect with EcoVadis at http://www.ecovadis.com or email sales @ ecovadis . com.

Contact
David McClintock, Marketing Director
EcoVadis
(805) 364-3239
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SOURCE EcoVadis

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