Mutual Recognition

Leveraging our experience conducting over 17,000 on-site and remote assessments per year we support clients to understand the social and environmental audit, compliance, mutual recognition eco-system.   ELEVATE works with clients to build assessment tools that address emerging issues that traditional audit approaches do not assess such as the Labour Agency Assessment Tool and Third Party Service Provider Tool.

Companies face a growing number of audit standards and industry programs to manage social compliance. With mutual recognition or audit sharing approaches becoming more popular, it is important to identify gaps and challenges of third party audit standards. ELEVATE Equivalency products aim to provide a clear insight into alignment of audit standards against a company’s own checklist or any other standard and provides tools to support a tailored approach to mutual recognition/audit sharing.

Our Equivalency products include:

1. Equivalency Analysis. A review of industry programs to understand how they compare to the company’s own program. Criteria include industry program’s governance, costs, standards coverage, audit checklist and remediation expectations.
2. Equivalency Mapping. Comparison of all indicators within a set of audit checklists against a defined baseline (i.e. the company’s own checklist). Gives insight into overall alignment and gaps.
3. Program Recommendations. ELEVATE provides recommendations, including benefits and challenges of recognizing specific industry programs and program design considerations.
4. Tool Creation. ELEVATE builds an equivalency tool by using the results of the mapping to enable consistent report conversion.
5. Report Conversion. Our equivalency team manage the process of audit report conversion or can provide training and support for in-house teams.