Around the world, many organizations rely on hundreds to thousands of external partners who introduce operational, financial, and reputational risks to your company. When you utilize third-party risk management (TPRM) software, your team can better manage increasingly complex vendor ecosystems with greater efficiency, resilience, and confidence. TPRM software provides you with a centralized and structured way to identify, assess, monitor, and mitigate risks, all while reducing the clutter of spreadsheets, email chains, and manual processes on an overworked and likely under-staffed team. This blog will outline the benefits of adopting TPRM software and will demonstrate a business case that you can share with the stakeholders and decision makers of your organization.
From onboarding, maintenance, monitoring, and assessing, your team is spending long hours on administrative work each time a new vendor is brought on, not to mention a constant influx of new vendors that keep the pipeline full. Adopting a dedicated platform allows users to reduce the hours spent on repetitive administrative tasks, which ultimately can bring substantial cost savings and allow users to focus on greater areas of risk. TPRM tools add additional levels of visibility to your vendor ecosystem that you may not have previously had. With standardized controls, service specific questionnaires and remediations to address shortcomings, that visibility will level-up your decision making, as teams will be able to quickly identify where the highest risks lie, which vendors are critical to successful operations, and where additional controls may be required. As a result, resource allocation can become more strategic, onboarding will become more predictable, and risk-based decisions are easier to justify to stakeholders. Your team gains greater visibility, can make educated decisions faster, and you gain money back in the budget.
The investment into a TPRM tool also strengthens compliance posture. Regulations and industry standards are increasingly requiring demonstratable oversight of your third parties. Luckily, TPRM software can provide your team with assessment-ready transparency. Assessments, communications, and key decisions are captured in a dedicated record. This reduces assessment fatigue on the part of your team, while also decreases the risk of non-compliance. Automated quarterly check-in’s with third-parties can help ensure that they remain in compliance with your company policies and provide monitoring for the duration of an engagement. This reduces the likelihood of expensive incidents, such as data breaches or regulatory violations, as a TPRM tool is able to provide continuous monitoring, automated alerts, and standardized controls. Plus, it ensures that your company can demonstrate robust oversight of its vendor ecosystem at any time, because evidence is no longer spread across emails, folders, and spreadsheets.
Assessments can be very broad and time-consuming. Sometimes they involve an on-site visit while other times they can be a remote review. The time it takes for an assessment to take place can become lengthy when assessments are not organized. A TPRM software can help organize the process and keep the pipelines moving automatically. Resources only have to step in when there is an exception to the process or when the assessment actually has to be performed and reviewed. The assessment itself can also become unwieldy when there are significant numbers of controls. A software that helps automatically reduce controls not in scope by control mapping and allocation can reduce the manual effort of an assessors having to determine when is in scope or not. This allows for more time spent on the actual risks themselves when the scoping is performed by the system.
TPRM software also offers a sustainable alternative to staffing concerns. As your company grows, so does the complexity of your vendor ecosystem. When all the processes are handled manually, that means those processes can only scale by adding more people. As a result, accuracy and consistency can suffer. However, by standardizing workflows, centralizing documentation, and automating repetitive tasks, your organization can scale vendor oversight without drastically increasing your headcount. This makes investing in TPRM tools not just a long-term cost-saving measure, but a contributor to long-term plans of organizational growth.
Ultimately, investing in a TPRM tool is not just about adding the latest technology to your tech stack. Rather, it is a choice that will strengthen your risk posture, improve operational efficiency, save money, and protect your organization from potentially costly third-party errors. As your company grows and the vendor ecosystem along with it, you’ll need a modern, scalable approach to vendor risk management. TPRM software provides your organization with the structure, automation, and visibility that is required to be able to manage risk with confidence. With streamlined workflows, customized questionnaires, audit readiness, and a timeline of actions taken with a vendor, you’ll be able to make informed business decisions that set your team up for success.
Need help building out your TPRM program? Reach out to the experts at Start for a complimentary consultation.
