Implementing Supply Wisdom: An Enterprise-Level TPRM Solution for a Global Telecom Company

Introduction

A leading global telecom company, renowned as one of the world's top 3 largest telecom operators, is committed to maintaining robust third-party risk management and enhancing operational efficiency across its vast network. Operating in a highly dynamic and competitive sector, the company seeks innovative third party risk management solutions to streamline processes and ensure compliance with stringent industry standards.

Challenges

• Lengthy vendor assessment and approval processes inhibited growth.

• Monitoring the health of over 8000 vendors was time-consuming and manual.

• Lack of real-time external risk intelligence limited proactive risk management.

• Over-reliance on questionnaires failed to capture dynamic risks.

• Absence of geopolitical information and alerts required inefficient manual research.

• Growing supplier base and outsourcing activities stretched resources thin.

• The Senior Director of Enterprise Risk Management struggled to meet a five-day turnaround on service-level agreements with prospective vendors.

• Manual work overload prevented the team from addressing new challenges and innovating.

Choosing the Solution:

Key Decision-Maker: Senior Director of Enterprise Risk Management

Decision Process: After extensive evaluation of several solutions, the telecommunications company selected Supply Wisdom's full-stack AI-based SaaS continuous monitoring platform. The decision was influenced by Supply Wisdom's proven capability to transform open-source data into actionable risk intelligence across multiple critical domains, including operational, ESG, Nth party, compliance, and geopolitical risks. This geopolitical risk information not only supports traditional third-party risk management decisions but also informs strategic decisions, such as where to locate new global shared services. This demonstrates how TPRM investment can drive significant benefits beyond the initial business case, providing direct decision support in a visible way.

Additionally, Supply Wisdom was chosen for its willingness and ability to offer a tailored solution that integrates seamlessly with the telecom company's existing platform. This flexibility was crucial for a large enterprise with non-negotiable requirements for using its own systems, ensuring that the solution met the company's specific needs without requiring disruptive changes to its established processes.

The Use Cases:

Implementing Supply Wisdom’s platform enabled the telecom company to address significant risk management challenges:

• Use Case 1: Faster onboarding

Supply Wisdom's platform streamlined the vendor approval process, reducing the duration from two months to five days and meeting the corporate mandate for rapid service-level agreement execution. This acceleration was driven by the diverse external risk intelligence and assessment efficiency provided by the platform. The telecom company was able to leverage a wide range of information to make tailored and intelligent risk decisions, rather than just speeding up processes superficially. The technology and insights gained allowed the company to do more than before, achieving faster onboarding without compromising thoroughness or quality.

• Use Case 2: Enhanced Visibility

Real-time monitoring and alerting for over 8000 global suppliers transformed the program from a manual, reactive one to an automated, proactive system. This change empowered front-line business stakeholders with information, helping them become a stronger first line of defense. Consequently, the TPRM team evolved into a much stronger second line of defense, significantly enhancing the visibility and management of operational and compliance risks.

Results and Benefits:

1. Enhanced Efficiency and Scalability: Increased monitored suppliers from 1,000 to over 8,000 within 2.5 years, saving 500,000+ man-hours in manual reassessments and reviews, and significantly reducing vendor approval times, thereby improving operational efficiency and cost savings.

2. Advanced Risk Management: Shifted from point-in-time questionnaires to a real-time, evidence-based approach with external risk intelligence and alerting, enhancing the company’s ability to proactively manage risks and maintain security requirements without hindering business progress.

3. Improved Vendor Selection: Integrated risk intelligence into the RFx process, minimizing indirect costs and aiding in the selection of more stable, secure providers, which enhanced the company's agility and responsiveness to market changes and opportunities.

   
   

The implementation of Supply Wisdom's tool improved risk management and led to significant time and cost savings. The tool enhanced risk visibility by continuously monitoring critical targets and identifying a full spectrum of potential risks in real-time.

“As we move forward in partnership with Supply Wisdom, our firm will be able to drive even proactivity in managing third party risk, monitoring third parties throughout their lifecycle and driving effective enterprise governance of the supplier base at a time when the focus has never been greater on third party risk.

These outcomes are attributable to the risk intelligence provided to our third party risk management program by Supply Wisdom which is directly enabling us to begin our transformation away from a reactive, questionnaire-based third party risk management model towards a controls-based framework sustained by continuous monitoring.”

-Senior Director of Enterprise Risk Management, Global Telecom Company