In today’s interconnected business environment, knowing your business partners and vendors is critical to maintaining the trust and confidence of your customers and stakeholders. Globalization has created a dependency on critical activities outsourced to an increasing number of partners and vendors. Having this dependency on third parties increases your company’s vendor-related risk.
Reliance on third parties is substantial and continues to gain momentum; therefore, vendor management has increasingly become an important organizational discipline and practice in maturing enterprise-wide resiliency. Outsourcing has its benefits, such as heightened efficiency and the ability to focus on core business objectives. However, if vendors lack strong safeguards. controls, and restrictions, the organization could be exposed to operational, regulatory, financial, or reputational risk.
A good vendor risk management strategy should include:
- Strong contract management, ideally with an integrated system by which contracts are stored and managed with clearly outlined service level agreements defining the business relationships between the organization and the third-party
- Ongoing vendor reviews to ensure vendors meet all regulatory compliance within the industry and have a scalable system in place that can monitor this compliance at an appropriate cadence
- Clear guidelines pertaining to access and control of sensitive information as per the vendor agreement
- Performance metrics that are periodically monitored and analyzed to ensure the quality of service is meeting contractual agreements
- Up-to-date vendor profiles on a regular basis
- Annual vendor risk assessments on all mission-essential vendors
- Vendor testing, communication, and crisis management plans as necessary
Even more so, identifying vendor relationship manager on the business side that act as a liaison between the vendor, the business. and the risk management team is also a recommended best practice, but isn’t always feasible. This person typically owns the vendor relationship in terms of services they provide and their ongoing performance and compliance. The relationship manager is in charge of reporting issues when the vendor fails or underperforms and is responsible for working with the vendor to complete any outstanding assessments or attestation to company policy, code of conduct, etc.
No matter the industry, it is increasingly becoming more and more important to effectively manage and monitor the risk exposures resulting from third-party suppliers. And, making sure you have the data needed to do so is key to successful vendor management. The Fusion Framework System provides a centralized repository of all vendors and suppliers in one secure system, giving you all of the information you need in one place.
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