As your supply chain grows and you rely more and more on third-party relationships to meet your objectives, the job of monitoring and managing these relationships grows. Visibility begins to shrink – and it becomes increasingly difficult to know your true exposure to risk. But managing the risk posed by your suppliers and the value they generate to your business is more crucial than ever. It is essential to your organization’s effectiveness and protecting its reputation.
Headlines of ransomware attacks, massive data privacy breaches, supplier governance inadequacies, and social injustices, such as modern slavery practices buried deep in a supply chain, are calling into question the reputations of well-known brands. More often now, the line between a positive headline and a negative one can be tracked to a single event resulting from an overlooked supplier control.
The key to effectively managing your supplier relationships is information. Unfortunately, most organizations lack a complete view of their third-party relationships and cannot afford the time and resources required to maintain the information necessary to manage these relationships. The information necessary to effectively manage a supplier relationship should include:
- Supplier controls and contractual commitments regarding the products and/or services being provided.
- Supplier performance, including the ability to meet business expectations and maintain risk controls over the lifespan of the relationship.
- Supplier risk profile, including risks inherent to the relationship and the adequacy of supplier controls that have been put in place to mitigate these risks.
To manage the complexity and dynamics of a supplier ecosystem, enterprises need for a holistic third-party lifecycle framework. This is the one of the most critical tools an organization can use for monitoring and managing a supplier base. It not only provides analysis of internal and external information sets, but allows you to turn the information into actionable intelligence to address potential problem areas before a negative event occurs.
ISG GovernX® is a comprehensive third-party management framework. It supports a practical, holistic supplier management approach by:
- Using AI to extract key obligation and risk profiling information from your contracts
- Gathering risk profiling information from stakeholders who are best positioned to understand the supplier relationship
- Identifying potential high-risk areas and gathering the necessary information from suppliers to determine the adequacy of existing controls
- Automatically tracking supplier performance against contract obligations and service levels
- Reviewing the accuracy of invoices for service agreements
- Enabling executive insights and benchmarking key commercials against the market
ISG GovernX® gives organizations everything they need to maintain insight and oversight of their third-party portfolio. With real-time transparency into suppliers – enterprises can mitigate risks to performance, sustainability, information security, labor standards and other regulatory requirements.
See for yourself how ISG GovernX offers a foolproof way to manage risk across the entire lifecycle of your third-party relationships. Or contact us today to discuss how ISG GovernX can help you.
About the author
David England
David offers over 25 years of experience in information technology outsourcing with extensive experience in vendor management, change management advisory services. David has provided outsourcing advisory services for a number of clients supporting RFP development, provider selection retained organization design, vendor governance and obligation management. David has been with ISG for over 6 years. Prior to ISG, David had Account Management responsibilities at EDS and was a Business Process Reengineering consultant at A.T. Kearney. David has extensive international ITO experience and spent more than 11 years in Asia where he led numerous business transformation and IT transition projects.
