How to deal with requests coming through Daato

About Daato

Daato is a sustainability management software used by companies for the implementation of legislation such as CSRD, EU Taxonomy, CO2 footprint and also the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act (LkSG) and the EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD). 

Daato can also be used to analyze sustainability risks in the supply chain by performing an abstract risk analysis in which the suppliers' locations are assessed using country risk indices and the products supplied using information on product risks. This enables Daato to assign a risk level to all suppliers. The Daato user can then move on to the concrete risk analysis, where they can approach suppliers with a higher abstract risk and request further information or actions. This includes the following:

Code of Conduct

One possible action by the Daato user is to request consent to the supplier code of conduct. The LkSG requires affected companies to draw up a supplier code of conduct and obtain the consent of their suppliers. 

If you as a supplier receive a request for consent to the code of conduct, you have various options: 

• You can download and sign the code of conduct attached by your customer.
• You can communicate and provide evidence that you meet the requirements in another way.
• You can refuse to agree to the code of conduct and thus also to the request.

If you download and sign the code of conduct from the customer, you need to upload it again in Daato and submit the request.

Self-assessment

Another possible action of the Daato user is to send a self-assessment questionnaire to risky suppliers. The questionnaire contains specific questions about the supplier's measures in all relevant risk categories of the LkSG - however, as a supplier you will only receive the categories where the abstract risk assessment for the product you supply or the country in which you are based exceeds the risk thresholds set by the Daato user. 

In the questionnaire, you then have the option of answering all questions yourself or forwarding the entire document to a colleague via the action menu. You should upload documents where requested so that your customer can understand what your information is based on. As soon as the questionnaire has been completed, you can send it back to the customer. Based on your answers, the questionnaire is evaluated and then leads to an adjustment of your risk level. The questionnaire therefore gives you the opportunity to reduce/improve your risk level at Daato.

Preventive measures 

Daato users can also request preventive measures. With Daato, the content of the preventive measures is based on the risk categories of the LkSG, but is also very similar to the self-assessment questionnaire. So if you receive prevention measures from your customer via Daato and have already received and answered a self-assessment questionnaire, you will see that the categories and measures are similar to those in the self-assessment questionnaire. The background to this is that Daato can use the scoring model that is also used for the questionnaire. As a supplier, you now have the opportunity to improve your risk scoring, which is the result of answering the self-assessment, by implementing the requested prevention measures. 

Depending on how many prevention measures your customer requests, you will receive one or more requests via Daato. The reason for the potentially many requests with different prevention measures is that you should be able to carry them out separately at your own pace. In each individual request, you can either indicate that you have already carried out the measure by filling in and answering your customer's request directly. Alternatively - if you need more time - you can plan the implementation of the measures. This works via the action menu, and you then have the option of entering a date by which the measure should be implemented and - as soon as this is done - clicking on the request again and changing your answers and then sending them to the customer. Alternatively, you can of course also reject the implementation of the action.

Remedial actions

Through Daato, customers also have the option to set up a grievance mechanism through which any potentially affected person or stakeholder can submit a complaint about sustainability in the supply chain, as well as to use a media monitoring tool that analyzes more than 150 million media sources and highlights potential sustainability risks related to suppliers as soon as they are reported. 

These two situations, as well as manually filed incidents, can be used by Daato users to prompt suppliers to take remedial action. In this context, the Daato user can select the risk category or categories in which an incident has occurred and then send a request to the supplier concerned. In a message, the Daato user can then specify to you as the supplier which corrective measures he is requesting from you, and you can then respond and implement, plan or reject the measures.