How we support you
Designing mature and cost-effective due diligence
Our work focuses on collaborating with sustainability, procurement, legal, risk and business teams to design and operate human rights and environmental due diligence so it functions as part of day-to-day decision-making, rather than as a parallel compliance exercise.
1
Setting scope and boundaries
One of the first practical challenges in due diligence is scope. Organisations struggle to decide how far due diligence should reach across operations and value chains, and how deep analysis needs to go.
The pressure is often to assess everything. In practice, this creates systems that are overwhelming to run, expensive to maintain, and difficult to defend when challenged on why certain areas received less attention than others.
We help organisations define:
- which parts of the value chain require closer scrutiny first
- how to balance breadth and depth in a proportionate way
- where due diligence effort adds real insight, and where it does not.
This creates a scope that teams can realistically oversee and explain, while avoiding over-engineering and blind spots.
2
Making responsibilities and key decisions work
Due diligence rarely fails because responsibilities are absent. It fails because responsibilities are spread across functions without clear interfaces.
We work with organisations to design how due diligence operates across sustainability, procurement, legal, risk and business teams, including:
- defining roles and interfaces between functions
- clarifying who decides what, and at which level
- setting escalation thresholds for management and board attention.
This often involves revisiting policies, codes of conduct and procedures — not to add new commitments, but to ensure they reflect real risk priorities and can be applied in practice.
3
Identifying and prioritising real-world impacts
HREDD is an impact-based process. We support organisations in identifying potential and actual adverse impacts on people and the environment across operations and value chains.
This includes:
- combining internal data with external sources and stakeholder input
- assessing impacts based on severity and likelihood, not only reputational or financial exposure
- distinguishing between issues that require immediate intervention and those that can be monitored
- ensuring that data, assessments and prioritisation are supported by tools and systems teams can realistically use.
The result is a prioritisation that management can act on, rather than a long list of undifferentiated risks.
4
Translating priorities into action and mitigation
This is where many due diligence systems stall. Risks are identified and documented, but teams struggle to turn that insight into action.
We support organisations in translating priorities into concrete mitigation and response measures, such as:
- sourcing and contracting decisions;
- supplier engagement and improvement plans;
- adjustments to operational controls or monitoring;
- decisions on remediation, escalation, or — where necessary — disengagement.
This is where due diligence connects directly to responsible sourcing and supplier engagement. HREDD provides the rationale and prioritisation; these processes provide the levers.
5
Maintaining oversight and confidence
Due diligence only works if leadership can see what is happening, why decisions are taken, and what is changing as a result.
We support organisations in setting up monitoring, escalation and communication that keeps leadership informed and decisions explainable over time. This includes:
- defining what is tracked, how often, by whom, and what happens when progress is insufficient
- establishing clear escalation and communication lines to senior management, the board, and external stakeholders as scrutiny increases.
The objective is to give leadership confidence that due diligence is under control and decisions remain consistent as expectations evolve.
6
When collaboration becomes necessary
HREDD often reveals that some risks cannot be addressed by individual companies alone. They may be systemic, shared across an industry, or rooted in local contexts beyond a single organisation’s control or leverage.
Where this is the case, due diligence findings may point toward collective responses such pre-competitive collaboration with peers or engagement in multi-stakeholder initiatives.
We support organisations in determining when collaboration adds value rather than additional process.
