There is growing interest in U.S. manufacturers seeking domestic sources of supply. Some companies have already experienced increasing secondary supplier orders as product demand exceeds production capacity. In other cases, some suppliers have reduced manufacturing operations, which has opened the door for those seeking new customers.
As you plan to form new supply chain relationships and pursue new business opportunities, many organizations seek relationships that provide higher organizational value. Discrepancies with how partners and vendors vet, select, and manage to introduce variables into the ecosystem create threats that can erode corporate value.
Would it be helpful to understand the financial impact of cyber risk across your ecosystem? Would it help to know how you compare to your competitors? These seem like obvious questions, yet companies waste resources negotiating risky suppliers’ relationships. Inconsistent evaluation and oversight increase the probability of future disruption and loss. Would you like to know which vendors pose the most risk to your company? Let us explain how you can understand and reduce your risk.
What is third-party risk?
To better understand the impact third parties can have on a company, we need to understand the meaning of third-party risk. Third-party risk is the potential financial loss resulting from one business that relies on external parties to perform services.
Beyond the common services such as manufacturing parts or the assembly of products for a company’s customers, third-party risk can also stem from the shared data between companies and these external parties. Companies build more connections and relationships with third parties, especially those not adequately vetted. The resulting risk associated with business disruption and data breaches increases in probability. Third-party management can help reduce the risks associated with working with third parties.
What is third-party management?
Businesses will often use a process called third-party management to reduce the potential risk and impact that a company might experience while working with third-party companies. Third-party management is the structured process that companies use to monitor their third parties while managing the risks that arise from interacting with the external parties involved with contractual and non-contractual business relationships.
Third-party management is also used to govern each third party’s level of access to a business’s systems and information. This process minimizes exposure to data and intellectual property theft from cyber-criminal organizations that use third parties as attack vectors.
According to a 2020 Annualized Risk Report by DHL Resilience360, the risks you take may cost more than you want to pay.
- 69% of firms say they do not have full visibility into their supply chains.
- 63% of organizations do not use any technology to analyze, track, and monitor their supply chain performance.
- 73% of board members surveyed identified reputational risk as to the area where they felt most vulnerable, but only 30% had a plan to address a reputational crisis.
- 99% of all companies have experienced a disruption in their supply chain over the past 5 years.
The survey cited three key benefits of risk monitoring.
- Empower the team with optimized incident alerts with near real-time data on global incidents.
- Ability to gather feedback from people when the location is impacted.
- Enable your logistics teams to react sooner to prevent supply disruption.
In 2019, cybersecurity incidents also continued to pose a severe threat to supply chain operations as Resilience360 recorded a total of 290 cybersecurity incidents impacting supply
chain entities.
According to a 2019 survey conducted by Spiceworks, out of 600 businesses, 44 percent experienced a data breach caused by a third-party vendor. Companies that take an active approach to third-party management can effectively reduce the risk of experiencing a data breach and protect valuable product secrets from competitors or markets where intellectual property theft is common. The following tips can help the executive leadership better protect their livelihood with third-party management.
1. Assess and manage third-party risks
While discussing future relations and business opportunities, a third party can ultimately lead to better opportunities. It is essential to understand and identify what risks the third party may introduce to your business. Using a risk management plan can also help better assess whether or not the new business relationship is indeed worth it.
2. Third-party screening and due diligence
During the onboarding process with third parties, businesses should screen and maintain due diligence for any risky or suspicious interactions with the third party. Reviewing the location, countries of operation, and the previous history are just a few steps to help a business better understand exposure to risks. In addition to screening during the onboarding process, having due diligence and continuing screening after building a new third-party relationship can help businesses protect themselves from third-party risks.
3. Fourth-party involvement
Many third-party businesses operate with unknown or undisclosed fourth parties, affecting their supply chain members. To help mitigate against fourth-party involvement, companies should understand if a third party or a subcontracted entity provides the requested service. Businesses should also contractually bind third parties to inform and wait for approval of any changes that could affect the relationship between your business and the third party.
Third-party risk management helps manufacturers ensure their IT vendors deliver on their promises.What is a third-party risk assessment?
Like performing an internal risk assessment, businesses can conduct third-party risk assessments to evaluate and identify the risks that can impact their business. How can the leadership team make effective decisions without identifying, quantifying, and managing the risk variables across any supply chain? Effectively managing partners, vendors, suppliers, and other third parties require in-depth assessment services.
Third-party risk assessment services traditionally focused on operational risk, financial viability, compliance, and ethics. Now that instabilities across supply chains are exposed, the focus on fourth-party risk intensifies. Fourth-party risk evaluates the effectiveness of your partners’, vendors’, and suppliers’ third-party risk programs to identify additional risk exposure that would otherwise go undetected.
What is third-party risk management (TPRM)?
The ongoing evaluation of your partners, vendors, suppliers and other entities to drive cost savings and trust efficiencies is key to effective third-party risk management (TPRM). The critical function of the TPRM process is to understand and manage risk exposure from third-party relationships throughout the lifecycle. When businesses evaluate third parties, many areas are examined to identify not only the risks that the third party itself might face but how those risks may affect your business and supply chain partners.
Risk introduction occurs in critical areas of the supply chain include cyber, privacy, digital, brand, and compliance. Strategies for third-party risk management also focus on how business anticipates future interactions within your ecosystem. This may include
- how and what kind of data can be shared
- what level of access each third party has to your systems
- what impact can disruption from that third party have on meeting production schedules
Third-party risk management is a continuous process, meaning that the team should regularly evaluate third-party members of your supply chain and the risks they pose to your company. Regular evaluations can reduce exposure time and help mitigate risks that your business has deemed too expensive when working with third-party relationships.
What is supply chain management (SCM)?
Supply chain management is another factor of third-party involvement that businesses, especially manufacturers, need to consider. Supply chain management controls and manages the flow of goods and services throughout the supply chain’s entirety. This process involves acquiring raw materials and processing information and capital for supply and demand planning, production, and inventory management. Businesses typically utilize a combination of software and business strategy to create a competitive advantage against similar products or brands.
Along with managing the previously mentioned areas of the supply chain, supply chain management also covers the price, quality, and quantity of a product that is too available to potential customers. As all businesses understand, the quality and quantity of the commodity used for a product affect the product’s final price. The commodity’s popularity predetermines a commodity’s price for a given market. This price is impacted by the quantity and quality of the commodity. As the number of commodities increase, the overall cost can decrease, but the commodity’s quality may also decrease, and vice versa.
How does third-party risk impact SCM?
The due diligence aspect of monitoring and reporting available data can integrate accountability into your third-party risk management processes.Supply chain management (SCM) is an expansive and complex endeavor that relies on each partner, from suppliers, manufacturers, logistics, and beyond, to perform well. Due to these interconnected ecosystems, effective supply chain management also requires change management, collaboration, and risk management to create alignment and communication between all the participants. From a technical perspective, third-party supply chain members can affect data security used by the supply chain partners or even the members themselves. With third-party members in your supply chain that are not adequately vetted, these members may become a new vector for malicious organizations to steal sensitive information about your products, clients, and customers. Regularly checking the overall security of the third-party’s environments and digital assets can help evaluate the potential risks that could affect your business. However, this is just a scratch on the surface for what could lead to a possible breach. Having the ability to check if a third party has leaked credentials, insecure web applications, or poorly managed system patches without requiring an intrusive scan, can help your company make the important decision whether to establish a new business partnership with a third party or not.
Many organizations manage third-party risk case by case or with numerous systems, policies, and frameworks. While this addresses most of what is required for effective third-party risk management, it does not provide a comprehensive and consistent framework. The manufacturers, suppliers, and vendors risk failing to capture the full lifecycle and range of third-party relationships, creating inefficiencies, blind spots, and inconsistencies. The due diligence aspect of monitoring and reporting available data can integrate accountability into your third-party risk management processes. Understanding how well a potential third party handles their duties of maintaining various compliance standards while handling or storing sensitive intellectual property and customer data can better help your business understand what risks are associated with sharing data.
Attacks and data breaches related to third-party attacks affect businesses’ production capabilities and reputation and result in expensive fines and expenses associated with the type of data stolen. These fines can also include the needed cost to report impact to shareholders, reporting to affected customers, and the cost to repair systems and data usually used. Many businesses wish to have a predetermined estimate of a data breach’s financial impact while also determining the probable risk that their business will experience a breach. Services that use the Open Fair™ risk framework can help quantify an approximate cost value range for what your business will be expected to pay during the event of a breach while also providing the risk probability that a breach could occur. This quantifiable information can help companies justify the expenses needed to maintain and upgrade their security.
Many years ago, Warren Buffett warned his son Howard, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to lose it. If you think about that, you will do things differently.” Mr. Buffet wasn’t talking about supply chain management, but the concept still applies. Organizations are increasingly concerned about the reputations of the third parties that source, manufacture, transport, distribute, market, and sell their products worldwide. When assessing a third-party supplier or partner, reputation, risk, and cost are important, not necessarily in that order. The following manufacturing industries benefit from knowing which vendors pose the most risk to their organizations, streamlining the vetting and selection process.
- Paper products.
- Food, beverage & tobacco products.
- Fabricated metal products.
- Nonmetallic mineral products.
- Machinery.
- Plastics & rubber products.
- Printing & related support activities.
- Furniture & related products.
- Transportation equipment.
- Textile mills.
- Electrical equipment.
- Appliances & components.
- Petroleum & coal products.
- Wood products.
- Miscellaneous manufacturing.
- Computer & electronic products.
- Primary metals.
- Chemical products.
Given the risk issues outlined within this article, many manufacturers and producers would benefit from establishing a common set of standards and a more systematic approach to third-party risk management for more effective supply chain management. As proactive third-party risk monitoring and escalation processes are implemented, workflow adjustments increase efficiency to ensure consistency in knowing which vendors are causing the most risk.
As a proud supporter of American companies, Certitude Security® is working diligently to inform leaders and facilitate essential asset protection priorities for manufacturers and supply chains throughout the United States.
Problem discussions can be a defining moment in your career. If you are interested in value creation, learn about SPOT-Beam™ by Certitude Security®. We look forward to helping you and your business succeed!