Third-Party Risk Management : Studies show customers achieve significant and measurable ROI by utilizing Prevalent to automate and accelerate third-party risk management. If your current solution isn’t delivering these results, it’s time to consider alternatives.

Organizations are increasing their usage of third parties to cut costs and focus on core operations so they can improve margins and increase their competitive advantage in the market. But working with third parties can introduce risks that lead to breaches or compliance violations. That’s why it’s essential to have a mature and agile third- party risk management program in place to govern those relationships.

However, most companies are stuck with manual, inefficient programs that don’t enable them to even assess all their vendors much less properly score and remediate the risks they find. This blog utilizes results from a research study on business risk management software  in June 2020 to review why current TPRM practices are so inefficient and identify best-practice return on investment (ROI) metrics delivered in the Prevalent solution.

Why Third-Party Risk is So Complicated and Inefficient

Prevalent asked certain customers why they were unable to meet their assessment goals prior to using Prevalent. The chart shows the answer: not enough resources and time. Looking into the problem a little deeper, however, showed that companies typically struggle with three primary challenges in their programs, with each relating to resources and time.

Lack of adequate staffing resources and time prevent organizations from completing more assessments

Many companies are stuck in spreadsheet jail

A recent Forrester Research study showed that 50% of companies still rely on spreadsheet alone to do their auditing and controls. Since a spreadsheet-driven process inherently involves emailing them back-and-forth over email ad nauseam with limited or no version control, it ends up taking way too much time to get the accurate and complete answers you need from your vendors in order to make good risk-based decisions.

Third-party risk management is time-intensive

In our definitive TPRM study released in April, we learned that 34% of companies say that it takes more than a month to complete an assessment of top tier vendor. With all that time spent on simple collection of due diligence, when does the analysis happen? What about remediation?

Teams are overwhelmed and lack resources

According to Ponemon, the average company shares data with 583 third parties. How many third parties can an assessor or risk manager reasonably manage? How can an organization ensure there are no gaps or errors that will inevitably arise from such a manual people-intensive process?

The bottom line is that teams are struggling with reactive, resource-intensive approaches. That is why they turn to TPMS – for the proactive, process-driven model we deliver.

Best-in-Class Third-Party Risk ROI Metrics

In a customer study, we asked select customers to quantify the benefits their companies are realizing by using Prevalent to automate their TPRM programs. We believe these are best-in-class metrics. How do they stack up?

Half the hours required to manage vendors

When asked how much time they spend managing vendor assessments now versus before they began using Prevalent, customers report a 50% time savings. Because Prevalent automates the collection and analysis of vendor assessments, teams can spend less time on rote activities such as collecting data and more time on true business value-added activities such as remediating risks.