Vendor Risk Management is an important risk management priority for many organizations as hundreds, if not thousands of partners, vendors and service providers are relied upon to fill non-core functions or help create and/or maintain a new sales channel for business expansion. Usually, these external partners have access to much of the same data as regular employees do and commercially sensitive and proprietary data is often transmitted, stored and processed among a wide range of partner and vendor networks, outside the influence of one organization’s internal controls and security policies. In order to be effective, risk management activities must mandate that corporate control activities extend to third-party vendors, outsourcers, contractors and consultants when appropriate as these vendors may handle critical information and directly influence a company’s risk and compliance management process.
How BCS’ framework helps your organization with vendor risk management:
BCS’ framework helps you assess vendor compliance with your organization’s policies and controls, enabling you to manage vendor risk efficiently and effectively. Our solution enables the management of each of the key activities in an effective vendor management process, including risk-based vendor selection, relationship management, ongoing compliance monitoring, and flexible, effective management reporting.
- Facilitate aggregation of vendor information, including profiles, contacts, facilities, contracts and projects, in a centralized data repository for easier management
- Act as vendor relationship managers to minimize and manage risk associated with vendor relationships by tracking key performance indicators and the status of deliverables
- Consolidates assessment surveys, enabling vendor risk assessment both before and after the contract process to ensure compliance with company policies, controls and regulations
- Accelerates and reduces costs of assessments by enabling vendors and vendor line managers to complete assigned assessments easier and properly.
- Provides effective assessment of the vendor status including the vendor response and appropriate mitigation procedures, facilitating remediation tasks
- Provides risk transparency and visibility into high-risk areas of business, the status of ongoing vendor assessments and your organization’s overall risk exposure
