Pushing Sustainability in Procurement – Madhur Aggarwal, EcoVadis

This is texturong TV. I'm Bonnie Schneider for Tech strong TV. Ecovatis is committed to creating a more environmentally responsible global economy.

Joining me now is matter our growl Chief product officer of ecovadas to discuss sourcing and procurement practices for his company. And of course the partnership with Microsoft to drive their sustainability efforts, I've heard thanks so much for joining us. Can you share a little bit about your background and how you got started with this company?

Yeah, Bonnie, first of all, thanks for having me. It is it is super privileged to be with you and your audience at tech TV. But in terms of getting started the Eco watt is which is a French company what started by two people pure Francois and Frederick Chanel in 2007.

Correct hard to imagine that in 2007 actually their set of people who are passionate about sustainability overall, but the way it got started was pure transfer was it arriba, which is a well-known procurement software provider, which eventually got bought by sap and he received 125 question there questions question there from one of the providers Nokia actually at that point of time and they followed with Nokia. They said they've sent it to 500 suppliers and he saw there must be a better way to do this and a few weeks later. He read an article where French Is actually signed up for ethical uniforms for hundred thousand of their company employees and they saw the optic was more than normal and actually pure Francois being in procurement knew that this was the actual golden moment when actually sustainable procurement and supply chain was gonna actually lead to better outcome.

So it's it's an interesting story when you think about it in 2007 many of us probably were like, you know, not did not know how to spell sustainability. They saw these nuggets overall and little came this idea which 15 years later is is a movement at the space at this time. It's interesting.

They really sound like they were ahead of the curve back then can you share with us? What inspired ecobat is to launch this sustainability ratings and supplier engagement platform? Yeah, so what what inspired us is the simple belief system that actually one is data, but the other is the belief system in the conviction.

So the data actually shows that between 50 and 90 percent of your scope three or four carbon footprint and your system related footprint actually comes from your supply base overall, but it also actually is launched from the fact that a lot of the risk your business risk actually sits in your supply chain, right like take Industries their their direct and core material is part is driven by the supply base. We've seen that in the last, you know, a few years with covid and all of the things that supply chain. So how do you actually be risk that that supply chain?

And and that is where the whole Genesis is and then the ability to combine that with doing good? World is where the Genesis of the of the idea is and today low and behold. It's a multi-billion dollar industry, but more importantly it's an industry where people are saying hey, we can actually do better in the world.

That's great. So that that is a depositive message and I can see where that would be an inspirational Endeavor to get involved in. Let's take a deeper dive into the technical aspect.

So how does ecovatis help organizations assess Monitor and engage with their suppliers on sustainability performance? Yeah, so it's it's fairly fairly simple. We actually do that in in two ways.

We actually take our you know, first party and third party data and actually using our proprietary methodology help SS 100,000 companies in our in our Network first party data means data that is actually being supplied directly by your supply chain Partners who actually are going to be sharing their data in the form for questionnaire that we actually share with them and they're going to be sharing documents Etc. And the third party data is where we actually use our proprietary in-house AI technology to actually Scout the web to understand what is being reportedly about the company how that factors in whether that is positive negative. How recent that information is, and we actually plug all of that.

To our methodology, which is then through a combination of technology and human verified. And then a store is actually assessed and shared with the with the network and the participants in there that that's really fascinating because I would imagine as time goes on more data is available in those recent reports has that allowed you to kind of your constantly scaling because there's just so much more being reported in this area. Yeah, no that is a that is a great observation.

And what we do find is absolutely first the companies themselves the companies that are rated have become smarter have become more focused on this so they themselves have more reports and more data to actually report on share with us and they're more willing to do that because they actually see a business benefit to it. And the second thing is in public domain there is more and more information available. But what we also do find is there's almost a divide some companies actually have overload of information reported about them and some companies actually the smaller suppliers in actually some of the remote countries don't have enough information reported about them and that makes our combination of first party and third party pretty powerful that we are not reliant on just one source, they're able to bring all of those things together.

Hmm. Can you tell us about ecobatis partnership with Microsoft? How does that start and and where is it going right now?

Yeah. So Microsoft's a great great partner. In fact beer Francois was meeting them earlier in the week here.

So we actually love our partnership with with Microsoft and their Cloud for sustainability product. We are also actually a big partner of theirs on the Azure side. A lot of our data centers use their Azure technology.

So I think that is that is great from from that that perspective and just on on that. It's not just Microsoft. We actually do believe that we have an opportunity to partner with many providers in the in the tech ecosystem including sap, including Microsoft and and others to actually make sustainability pervasive and into the workflow of our customers.

Hmm and we mentioned some of the data sources that you use but how is this? How are you managing it in terms of ensuring the accuracy integrity and privacy of course of the data that's collected by this platform. Yeah.

So if you know in today's day and age, you cannot talk about data without actually talking about integrity accuracy privacy all of those. So those are principles that are native to us part of it is our French DNA, correct? We've always actually thought about those things by by Design but they're two or three specific things that we actually do.

So you talk about accuracy I talked about hey how we take first party data and third party data, but then we actually have large operations and our team of analysts that actually verified that data just because you actually happen to share a piece of information does not mean it may be maybe accurate so we actually have a number of people Who are going into the details verifying for their accuracy? The second is actually from an Integrity perspective. It is built in by Design not built-in by Design just from a technology perspective.

Not just from hey ensuring that our data centers are secure and you know, all of those data governance elements are in there, but also from product design perspective. So as a simple example in our Network our Network by definition has two sides requesting company and a rated company actually no participant in the network actually has access to each other's information without the participant explosive sale giving permission. So if I'm a rated company, I'm a supply or let's say I have to say this particular Enterprise company is able to see my rating or they are able to they see this specific element of my rating or my data.

So we've actually build that into product design for us and that is a core element for us. A lot of our audience that are watching on techstrong TV are in the devops field. So I wanted to ask you about what challenges ecobat is faced during the development phase for its platform and also integrating it with Microsoft Suite of products.

Yeah. So on the on the devops side of things or on the Microsoft, so obviously we've gone through Evolution given that we started in 2007 when devops wasn't a term as your participants would would actually know people were still thinking of their own data centers as the equalities at that point of time. But over time we've actually moved to the move to the hyperscalers overall and actually moved more big part of our workload to to the to the hyper hyperscalers.

Now in terms of the internal challenges that we run into we run into the same challenges that everyone else in devops field runs runs into his hey, how do you actually move more? More of the workload to the cloud how you actually get resiliency. How do you ensure correct?

You know you have failsafe and all of those those things. How do you ensure privacy? How do you ensure data residency requirements are met, you know in Europe versus in China versus in the US as an example.

So all of those are things that we are deal with as well, but I don't know if we deal with that in any more or less fashion than any of your viewers actually deal with. In fact, I would be curious to hear, you know, the learnings from them. Yeah exactly.

Now for the people that are using this platform you're cut your clients your customers. How can they access and analyze the data in real time? What mechanism do you have for that?

Yeah. So again, you talk about the platform and again, I you know take this opportunity to say our platform is a network right at the end. They there is a Enterprise company think of a Forbes 2,000 company that is actually using to rate a large number of their supply base.

And then on the other side is 100,000 plus would be referred to as rated companies or these are the suppliers, you know suppliers is the wrong word because sometimes these companies are are pretty big companies in their own ride overall sort of thing. So what what we actually do allow is on our Network. We allow people to access our data through API.

So obviously we will actually give you data access through API will build in the reports to give you insights from there. But then also be able to download some of this data that we believe that you should have access to while ensuring data privacy as we talked about Earlier in there. So all of those elements are available.

Yeah. You mentioned a little bit about Automation and I was wondering if you could kind of expand on that in terms of how you're using automation to streamline your processes. Yeah, so streamlining processes happens for us at multiple multiple levels.

The first level of for us is when we have a company of our size. How are we using automation to actually for our own internal purposes. So we use actually a number of capabilities including Salinas that some of your customers may be actually aware of to use our own Data Mining and better understand our own internal efficiency in there.

The second thing is Automation in terms of as I talked about the use of hyperscalers, and then that allows us to actually start automating some of the core engineering tasks that we don't have to spend time on and then finally from a product perspective. We actually use AI ml capabilities to automate some of these tasks to get additional data sources partnering with some data providers. Only to get more and more of this information so that we can reduce the burden of reporting on our our partners in the network.

Well for our final question, we started with the origin of the company. I'd like to talk about the future. So what is the vision that you have for the future of Eco vanice?

And how do you see the company evolving in the next five to 10 years? Yeah, so our our vision is very simple. Our guiding principle is guide all companies towards a sustainable World, correct?

And and we we use the word thoughtfully guide. All companies, correct. It is not like, you know small or large or mid companies towards the system world.

5 degrees by 2015 and we are a small player in that that is our end goal. That is the vision we are here for obviously sustainability software is the way we do it but that is that is the aspiration going after Thank you so much Matt here. That was a fascinating insight into the sustainability and all the advancements that ecovado says made and we look forward to seeing more of that in the future.

Appreciate you joining us today. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

That was mad her aguil Chief product officer at ecovatis. Well, stay with us on techstrung TV. We're going to have a lot more news coming up.