Improving The Supplier Experience In Third-Party Risk Management

When onboarding is overly complex or communication unclear, suppliers can disengage, leading to slower responses, incomplete data, and missed risk indicators. 

This creates risks for buyers too. A poor supplier experience can reduce data quality, delay procurement cycles, and limit visibility into potential threats.

Over time, unmanaged friction in the process can leave organisations exposed to compliance failures, operational disruption, and reputational harm. 

By understanding these common supplier concerns, buyers can build a third-party risk management framework that improves collaboration, strengthens trust, and ensures better outcomes for everyone. 

1. Repetitive Data Requests 

Suppliers are frequently asked to provide the same certifications, policies, and documents to multiple buyers - often in slightly different formats. This duplication increases admin effort, introduces frustration, and can slow onboarding. 

Why it matters for buyers: 
Disjointed requests can lead to inconsistent data, out-of-date documentation, and missed deadlines - delaying access to critical products and services. 

Consequence of doing nothing: 
Without a more efficient process, suppliers may deprioritise your requests or provide incomplete information, exposing your organisation to hidden third-party risks. 

How to improve: 
Standardising your supplier risk assessment process, or using shared third-party risk management frameworks, reduces duplication and improves data quality. 

2. Managing Onboarding and Priorities Effectively   

Long, complex onboarding processes and misaligned risk priorities often frustrate suppliers and slow down procurement. When due diligence doesn’t reflect a supplier’s actual risk profile, low-risk vendors face unnecessary scrutiny, while genuinely high-risk providers can slip through without proper checks. 

Why it matters for buyers: 
Inefficient onboarding delays projects, disrupts operations, and damages supplier relationships. It can also put pressure on internal teams to fast-track procurement later - often at the expense of thorough risk management. 

Consequence of doing nothing: 
Failing to align your onboarding process with actual third-party risk increases exposure to financial, operational, and reputational damage. In highly regulated sectors, this also raises the risk of non-compliance and failed audits. 

How to improve: 
Adopting a risk-based third-party risk management framework allows you to tailor assessments to the supplier’s profile, ensuring higher-risk vendors undergo deeper checks while lower-risk suppliers move through onboarding faster. This creates efficiency without compromising on control. 

3. Poor Visibility into Next Steps 

Suppliers often don’t know where they are in the onboarding process, what’s required of them, or why certain data is being requested. This lack of clarity can result in delayed responses and lower engagement. 

Why it matters for buyers: 
When suppliers are in the dark, timelines slip, and data quality suffers - making it harder to manage third party risk effectively. 

Consequence of doing nothing: 
Missed milestones, slower approvals, and strained supplier relationships can create delays and reduce trust in your procurement process. 

How to improve: 
Embedding clearer communication into your TPRM process - from timelines to assessment criteria - builds transparency and improves collaboration. 

Making the Process Supplier-Friendly

When TPRM processes are unnecessarily complex, everyone loses. Suppliers provide slower responses, buyers face longer onboarding times, and both parties have reduced visibility into potential third-party risks.

Over time, these inefficiencies compound - increasing costs and exposing organisations to avoidable threats. 

Making the process supplier-friendly doesn’t weaken your controls; it removes unnecessary duplication and confusion so both buyers and suppliers can focus on managing real risks. It builds trust, increases engagement, and improves the quality of data that underpins your third-party risk assessments. 

Shared TPRM solutions like FSQS support this by: 

• Reducing duplicated requests across buyers 

• Centralising validated supplier information 

• Accelerating onboarding while maintaining robust due diligence