Vendor registration
At the core of any Supplier Information Management strategy is the gathering and maintenance of data. apexanalytix streamlines vendor registration – including risk data – through an AI-enabled portal.
- When your team triggers an onboarding event; Portal cross-references your policies to categorize the supplier’s risk profile, industry and location. Using this, it identifies the information you need to collect – including compliance risk by jurisdiction.
- Much of this knowledge is gathered automatically from our database of over 100m company records supplemented by over 1,000 external data feeds.
- Your supplier is invited to provide additional information through a self-service portal.
- Their input is assessed; including bank account and insurance validation, prohibited entity checks and more. Their responses to regulatory questions are assessed to measure compliance.
To maintain consistency, supplier information is distributed via API to the relevant tools and data stores within your business. This could include ERP systems and your centralized data warehouse.
Automating vendor registration workflows helps you collect and verify the necessary data for each supplier. Through integrations with internal tools and workflows, this supports risk-aware decision-making at every touchpoint.
Risk monitoring
Risks evolve quickly but awareness often doesn’t. This means organizations can find themselves on the back foot when incidents occur; battling to restore operations rather than safeguard them.
By their nature, annual vendor questionnaires do not provide up-to-date awareness of emerging concerns. Through over 1,000 sources of external risk data, Portal ensures that your reporting stays up to date.
Examples of continuous risk monitoring within Portal include:
- Fraud checks against every invoice from each supplier
- Insurance monitoring to ensure that coverage remains in place and adequate
- Credit monitoring for emerging signs of financial distress
- Dark web monitoring to detect data breaches or ransomware attacks
- News monitoring for reports of potentially harmful incidents
- + many more, each weighted to reflect your policies and risk tolerance
Risk resolution
When a vendor’s risk level exceeds your tolerance, it must be resolved. This could be as simple as collecting documents to comply with a regulation or a more complex incident response workflow. Acceptable tolerances will vary by vendor and are automatically accounted for within the apexanalytix solution.
Many ‘solutions’ to vendor risk management rely on a stream of notifications instructing internal stakeholders to take action. Often, this approach results in no activity at all; either through a lack of internal bandwidth or as a result of too many false positives.
The apexanalytix solution mitigates this by only relying on human input when absolutely necessary – either because the mitigation can’t be automated or because policies say that a manual decision is required.
When human input is needed, the most relevant stakeholder is notified in the most appropriate way; ideally within their standard workflows (rather than email notifications). They’re quickly provided situational awareness, with AI-generated descriptions of the context and the action required of them.
Within your policies, there may be scenarios where concerns cannot be resolved with existing suppliers. In this case, sourcing events can be automatically triggered.
All resolution activity is trackable in our case-management system and within your reporting.
