As the global business environment becomes more and more complex, a company’s exposure to risk continuously increases. Over the past year or two, we’ve seen a growing attention to the function of risk management. Corporate leaders and boards now understand the value and criticality of investing in risk management, not only to meeting growing regulatory requirements, but also to establish a competitive advantage.

As a passionate proponent of supplier risk management, I’m pleased to see this traditionally less-than-sexy function getting more and more attention. However, it’s disheartening to hear stats such as this one, recently released by Gartner Research, showing that less than 15% of vendor management programs leverage analytics to identify and manage vendor risk.

Without analytics, how are companies making sense of the piles and piles of information that their vendor management programs generate? What sifts through the noise to narrow their attention to the critical, time sensitive, high-impact events? A common challenge I hear from vendor risk managers and third party risk managers is that they spend hours collecting and entering all sorts of data and information on their third party relationships only to run out of time at the end of each day to make sense of it all. In today’s global business environment, where risk climates shift by the minute, analytics is a critical requirement to an effective third party risk management program, not just a luxury.

One telltale sign of risk management maturity is the use of an organization-wide platform to share data and insights about third party relationships in real-time. This enables business leaders to focus on strategic decisions rather than tactical concerns.

At Supply Wisdom, we encourage a risk-aware culture and facilitate third party risk management through a suite of risk monitoring and management services. We have helped over 100 organizations gain greater visibility into their suppliers and the locations in which they operate in order to enhance third party management, avoid disruptions, meet regulatory and compliance requirements, and much more.

If you are struggling to identify and manage third party risks across your global operations, I invite you to learn more about Supply Wisdom. Email me to request a live demo today, or visit our Solutions pages to watch on-demand demos at your convenience.