Standard Owner Benchmark® Methodology
One of the biggest challenges in the sustainability industry is the need for more normalized data on sustainable procurement. Today, there are more standards that define sustainability than consumers can understand with over 1,000 existing standards and 50-100 new standards being added each year. CommonShare’s Standard Owner Benchmark® offers a comprehensive system for the comparative evaluation of Standard Owners to make it easier for brands and consumers to understand which standards are relevant and worth incorporating into their sustainable procurement plan. Our goal is to create incentives that establish a “race to the top” in digitization and best practices in sustainability, quality, labor, and origin standards.
Further, CommonShare’s Standard Owner Benchmark® allows Standard Owners to benchmark their performance against peers in the sustainable procurement market. The data powering the benchmark is continually updated through a combination of human research, machine learning algorithms, LLM driven AI, survey response, and real time management of company data within CommonShare’s platform.
The first version of the Standard Owner Benchmark® launched in April 2023. Data from members of CommonShare is used to rebalance the benchmark quarterly with data submissions required by May 31st, August 31st, November 30th, and February 28th of each year. Non-members have the opportunity to include their data on November 30th of each year.
CommonShare’s Standard Owner Benchmark® considers five dimensions as part of the benchmark: Governance, Supply Side Digitization, Buy Side Availability, Relevance and Digital Accessibility. Each Standard Owner obtains a grade between 1 and 5 for every dimension, 5 being the highest (best) grade, and 1 being the lowest. We then calculate the average from the total of all dimensions to obtain the final grade.
Obtaining a grade for each Standard Owner
We specifically look at 5 dimensions: Governance, Supply Side Digitization, Buy Side Availability, Relevance, and Digital Accessibility. Each Standard Owner obtains a grade between 1 to 5 for every dimension, 5 being the highest (best) grade, and 1 being the lowest. We then calculate the average from the total of all the dimensions to obtain the final grade.:
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The “Relevance” dimension considers the scale of the certification and the number of products and companies that currently are certified. Key variables include whether the standard owner operates regionally, nationally or internationally. Further, the rating considers whether a standard is B2B or B2C with slight favoring for B2C standards. Standard data is normalized across industries and then force ranked between 2 and 5 with a rank of 1 for companies that do not offer any publicly available information.