5 ways to accelerate your due diligence processes

For industry and business, technology has always been at the heart of increasing production, maximising efficiency and saving costs – from the water wheel and the horse-drawn plough, through to email and analytical tools.

Yet there are still organisations that rely heavily on manual processes that could be achieved quicker, more accurately and more effectively with the help of automation. Here are just five ways you can incorporate automation into due diligence, freeing up your resources and expertise to focus on the areas where your organisation really needs it:

1. Questionnaire issuance and scheduling

Choose a solution that includes features like a question library, and is flexible enough to allow you to tailor your digitised due diligence questionnaires (DDQ).

Schedule questionnaire issuance according to criticality of vendors and automate reminders to vendors as the deadline approaches.

Save yourself and your vendors a great deal of time and effort by allowing them to re-use answers from previous questionnaires that are still stored in your solution.

2. Scoring

Automating your scoring saves time and provides consistency during vendor evaluations. As your organisation’s needs change, you should review your scoring system accordingly.

The most important step is to define your scoring criteria – what will be the deciding factors when it comes time to choose one vendor over another? Think beyond your budget: Consider things like financial stability, operational risk and information security.

You can then assign weights to each factor that will help to determine the overall score for each response. The weights should reflect the relative significance of each element in the evaluation process.

Providing stakeholders with automated feedback in the form of scoring reports can help them to understand the scores and identify areas for improvement.

3. Evaluation and charting

Once you have defined your evaluation criteria and collected your data, you can use your due diligence solution to automatically aggregate the data. Your tool should calculate scores, generate rankings and enable comparative evaluation between peers.

You can then use your tool to present the evaluation results in a clear and meaningful way. This could include charts, graphs and other visual representations that effectively convey the evaluation outcomes.

Similarly, your solution ought to be able to automatically generate evaluation reports in any format that best meets you need, and can include the charts, summaries, and any additional information that your stakeholders need.

4. Year-on-year comparisons

Your tool should enable you to collect and store data in a structured, centralised way. When reviewing data from previous years, and comparing that with this year’s results, you ought to be using a tool with comparison functionality that can identify changes easily from year to year, highlighting to you any discrepancies and hence any score adjustments.

Once the changes have been calculated, your tool should be able to present this information in automatically generated reports (as it does for evaluation and charting purposes).

5. Reporting

A flexible solution will provide options for customising and personalising your reports. This means that stakeholders can specify their preferences for report content, layout, or data filters to ensure the reports meet their specific needs.

While risk minimisation and operational resilience lie at the heart of third-party risk management (TPRM), the organisations that are harnessing the power of automated TPRM tools are also giving themselves a distinct advantage.

As technology creates greater efficiencies and drives demand for swifter delivery, being able to move projects from inception to completion without compromise or delay during the TPRM process is now essential.

Talk to us to find out more about how we can help you to move your TPRM to the next level.