Increased Scrutiny of Third-Party Vendor Relationships (part 2)

Our CredAgility platform has the ability to incorporate or deploy these criteria, as a series of business rules within a workflow that will serve as automatic guardrails controlling how you will get information from vendors. It will also control how you manage it in the context of, what do you need to remediate and remind people about, and assess that it is what you think it is.

This process works in that using the CredAgility platform you create that oversight set of questions that goes into a workflow, that then allows your vendors to come online (through a portal), upload docs, and then also answer questions about those docs that you want to have as data elements that are then strategizable, your own vendor mgmt department will review answers and confirm that the documents are as they are stated by the third-party, in addition to being able to put in your disposition – u can also automate rules that will detect when you have exceptions so that you can have a report that will tell you your escalation opportunities and exceptions you need to handle and then the remediation efforts that are handled on the workflow.
Within the CredAgility platform we have ability to define the various sections you might want them to answer or upload documents about, and you would also have the ability to define what sections, various agencies would have the ability to partake in. You can define the data you need to capture about each document or section. Within the platform you can also establish what you want your vendor manager to do as another companion workflow. That manager can go through and provide their disposition on each of the documents and for that matter all of the questions that the vendor has answered. You can also design questionnaires within the portal. Specifically, you might want to ask the vendor to put the content that you care about into a data readable format so that you can have the information in order to process cross vendor analysis or put other workflow steps in the process for escalation and exception handling.

Everything you put into portal is auditable. The documents uploaded and questions answered by each vendor, as well as at each question level. You have record of what the answers were. You know where they are in terms of the document version. Versioning is something you lose in an e-file cabinet. This is something we have automated with the CMC solution. Finally, you have the ability to create reporting, which lets you take the data you’ve reported and see at a glance across all your third-party vendors, aall sets of documents, and questions you have data on. You can create a dashboard heat map by setting thresholds that will become highlighted when they aren’t met. This at a glance visibility makes the tasks of managing the process more straightforward and more efficient.

As the focus on vendor oversight compliance is strengthening, and the piles of paperwork supporting vendor audits are growing, now is the time to find a better way. Consider a solution that can provide greater transparency, ensure provability, and hopefully lessen the pain of continued regulatory scrutiny.