Good understanding and management of third-party networks within supply chains is critical for all businesses - however sustained supply chain disruption and evolving regulatory landscape can make this a difficult challenge. At the same time, the complexity of contracting with your third parties and suppliers, requires thorough portfolio management and complete contract solutions. We help clients navigate these challenges, to mitigate risk and reduce costs, allowing them to focus on their core strategic objectives.
Supply chain challenges are occurring more frequently across the world, with the disruption they cause, not expected to ease in the short to medium term. Businesses are looking for ways to manage these challenges, which balances cost, resilience and sustainability.
Market context and drivers
Increasing risk exposure and complexity
Increasing sanctions risk exposure as a result of geopolitical events is increasing operational, regulatory and reputational risk. Continuous monitoring of rapidly evolving sanctions regimes is key to balancing compliance and operational continuity.
The move to Net Zero demands greater visibility of the supply chain, specifically the need to fully understand and operationalise reporting requirements to mitigate regulatory risk and greenwashing exposure.
Rising volumes and increased complexity of contract lifecycle management, governance and compliance can result in clients not realising the full value of third party contracts, driving an increased cost-base as well as increasing non-compliance risks.
Advancement of tech solutions
Software solutions are offering businesses the opportunity to bring third party risk and contract management, alongside procurement functions, to unlock value, provide better visibility of data and simplify the technology stack.
Contracting
We support clients to proactively manage and maximise the value from third party contracts to:
- Enhance revenue: identify and monetise revenue leakage across existing commercial agreements
- Optimise, reduce and manage contract costs: Recover supplier costs due to over billing or under delivered services, or optimise contractual spend
- Contractual risk management: assessing contractual risks across the customer and sales channel e.g. protect IP, sanctions, AB&C
- Drive insights across your contract portfolio: Rapidly extract data from contracts supported by Tech/AI and contract specialists to deliver business insights and support informed decision making
We provide a range of services including:
- IP and licensing reviews
- Supplier contract audit
- IT Asset Management (ITAM) services
- Channel partner examinations including trade compliance
- Contract management and insights during a transaction
Third Party Risk Management
We help our clients identify, monitor and respond to third party and supply chain risks, using analytics and intelligence, to provide greater visibility and resilience. Our propositions include; Third Party Risk Management (TPRM), Third Party Resilience, Enhanced Due Diligence, Sanctions Screening and, Supply Chain & Risk Analytics.
Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) - There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to TPRM transformation. Working with key stakeholders, we can review and improve existing TPRM frameworks, as well as design and run bespoke end-to-end frameworks that are tailored to client needs. We have experience working with Digital Procurement solutions, such as Coupa, to help embed and transform TPRM as part of overall business strategy.
- Third Party Resilience - Our tech-enabled solution uses multiple data sources to monitor and assess third party resilience. It provides a holistic view of key third parties’ resilience and criticality using scoring and interactive visualisations. Third parties’ resilience can be compared with each other and tracked over time to identify high-risk entities and emerging trends.
- Enhanced Due Diligence - We can support clients in understanding third party opportunities and risks by interrogating a range of public records and human intelligence, identifying red flags and summarising reputational suitability.
- Sanctions Screening - With sanction regimes rapidly evolving and the resulting compliance challenges driving risk, our technology and regulatory experts can transform and execute the systems required to operate a successful sanctions programme.
- Supply Chain & Risk Analytics - We help clients to detect and monitor for high risk activity, such as fraud, error and corruption, in their supply chain and procurement process.
We advise on the latest analytics technology to monitor third party intelligence data and transactional data, and we lead on the implementation of technologies such as the Quantexa & PwC Risk Detect platforms.
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Response
We quickly respond to supply chain and third party incidents, bringing a holistic view - via Investigations, Restructuring support and Contentious Recoveries & Claims - to protect our clients’ reputation and safeguard resilience.
Examples of how we have helped our clients
Contract Lifecycle Management
PwC assisted a British multinational bank to simplify their supplier contracting process and reduce their time to contract. We helped bring together their legal, technology and procurement teams, along with their external legal counsel, by rewriting their global master templates, drafting a clause library and implementing the CLM vendor to digitally enable their contracts.
Third Party Due Diligence
Supported a client to undertake third party due diligence as part of its compliance programme. Our screening spanned 70+ countries and uncovered issues ranging from bribery allegations, sanctions and environmental law and labour rights violations.
Contract Governance & Compliance
Supporting a global multinational tech company to deliver a range of recurring contract services designed to support broader business strategies and initiatives. We leveraged our multi-disciplinary team of technical, accounting, and contract specialists coupled with our technology platforms to perform IP license reviews, channel partner examinations, and trade and sanction compliance support. In addition to mitigating risk and supporting customer success, our work also returned significant shareholder value and a ROI.
Third Party Risk Management
Designed a simplified Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) process for a global client, including advice on the right technology solution to facilitate TPRM workflow across the business. Our work included support with accompanying TPRM policies and procedures, helping the client achieve a consistent implementation across the business.
Supply Chain Risk Analytics
Working alongside our Alliance partner, Quantexa, we deployed their advanced analytics platform to help our client proactively monitor for supplier risk, fraud, error and non-compliance across their procurement, supply chain and compliance functions. Our client is now able to identify hidden risks across numerous typologies including procurement fraud, sanctions and bribery & corruption.
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