We live in a dynamic world where billions of people make billions of choices daily. The sheer multitude of choice makes it increasingly difficult to have shared experiences – those kind of global watershed moments that push change and innovation forward at an accelerated pace. Covid-19, in its own terrifying way, stopped us all and immediately narrowed our choices. But it also gave us one unified experience and one unified goal: Fight the virus, stop the spread.
A true global watershed moment had arrived. Suddenly, the whole world understood the importance of the supply chain. Procurement had been thrust onto center stage, and the spotlight was both harsh and illuminating.
Spotlight on Procurement
There’s no way to plan for every outcome. There just isn’t. No risk plan can predict the future with 100% accuracy. There’s no judgement to be laid at anyone’s doorstep. The impact of COVID-19 wasn’t something supply chain professionals could have easily seen coming. So, as the whole world watched the demand for certain products like N-95 masks, PPEs, disinfectant and toilet paper soar, they also saw the dramatic consequences of supply chains that weren’t built for pandemic-driven demand.
The links between the supply chain and business continuity, between business continuity and employment, between employment and economies, those links were now on stark display for everyone to see. Interdependencies that were once just the language of procurement professionals had become the common language of the world.
Chris Haydon, President, SAP Procurement Solutions
Certified Professional Accountants (CPAs) who are looking to earn Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits to maintain their licenses can improve their knowledge in third-party risk management by enrolling in SIG University’s Certified Third Party Risk Management Professional (C3PRMP) program.
SIG was recently approved by the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a CEP sponsor. The National Registry of CPE Sponsors recognizes and highlights CPE sponsors that provide CPE programs in accordance with nationally recognized standards.
CPA and equivalent designations who enroll in the CPE-track of SIG University’s Certified Third Party Risk Management Professional (C3PRMP) program will receive 66 CPE credits and graduate with a strong knowledge base of third-party risk management best practices that can be implemented immediately.
CPAs are in possession of highly sensitive client data that cybercriminals and other bad actors could exploit. This program touches on all areas of operational risk, including cyber, business resilience, financial, technology and reputational risk. Anyone who is serious about investing in their team and protecting the wider enterprise will benefit from the program’s focus on governance and oversight best practices, controls and board reporting with a view from the top.
Business today isn’t business as usual, as the COVID-19 pandemic impacts organizations and supply chains across the globe. And in uncertain times such as these, leaders in every industry and business function must step up. New leadership skills and traits will be necessary to ensure business continuity, and to inspire teams to work together to support each other and remain productive.
We recently interviewed Dawn Tiura, President and CEO of Sourcing Industry Group (SIG). Dawn will be presenting a thought-leader keynote titled “Leadership in Uncertain Times” at Ivalua NOW, the premier virtual event for procurement leaders, on May 5. During our interview, she shared with us her thoughts about how leaders must draw on different skills and traits when unexpected circumstances arise, and how the COVID-19 pandemic is inspiring them to employ different leadership styles to unite and motivate employees.
Today, procurement leaders have a seat at the table in e-staff meetings. How has the role changed over the past few years?
It’s changed dramatically. In the past, we were seen as overhead, not as a strategic partner. Procurement teams were just buyers who delivered what other departments told them to buy. Organizations viewed procurement as the bottleneck between what they wanted and when they received it. In reality, procurement sees all the waste and redundancy that exists in the supply chain, and has a significant impact on a business’s bottom line.
Aurelie Teyssier, Sr. Director of Marketing, Americas
SIG University’s Certified Third Party Risk Management Professional (C3PRMP) program is a globally recognized certification that is the “gold standard” in terms of relevance, scope and content. The C3PRMP program was created by Linda Tuck Chapman, an advisor, educator, author and expert, and is based on her experience and her book, Third Party Risk Management: Driving Enterprise Value (published by the Risk Management Association). You’ll soon learn that investing in the C3PRMP designation is an investment that will enhance your knowledge base and deepen your expertise.
Outlined here is information about the upcoming changes and benefits of your C3PRMP designation, as well as a profile of our students.
What is different about SIG University’s C3PRMP program in 2020?
In January, the duration of SIG University's C3PRMP program was extended from eight weeks to 10 weeks. Multiple-choice review questions at the end of each module will test all students’ knowledge and require a minimum passing score of 80%.
Members of the Global Association of Risk Professionals (GARP) will continue to earn 20 Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits, GARP’s highest award for a continuing professional development program.
In highly regulated industries, there are seemingly endless regulatory and compliance requirements and activities, and they often are inseparable from the underlying risk management activities themselves, including those for third parties.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. has arguably become the most complex and costly jurisdiction for regulatory compliance. An article published by World Economic Forum on enterprise risk management points out that banks are “less experienced with non-traditional threats such as cyber risk, strategic risk, operational risk, regulatory risk and legal risk. Making matters trickier, these risks aren’t easily quantified.” The authors also note that “the growth in such risks is virtually unprecedented in the history of banking. This puts a premium on firms’ abilities to make connections and to recognize the complex whole is far greater than the sum of its parts.”
The financial services sector leads the pack in terms of the amount of regulation it is subject to, including the compliance challenges, regulations and laws in near and far-flung jurisdictions, as well as the cost and complexity of compliance, risk management and governance practices. This sector is not alone is the endless struggle to balance costs and compliance. Healthcare, oil and gas, and the tech sector are also struggling with the cost and complexity to managing sector-specific risks and compliance.
Jai Chinnakonda, co-founder of a provider technology start-up, enrolled in SIG University's Certified Third Party Risk Management Professional (C3PRMP) program to learn how he can better serve his clients by gaining a more thorough understanding of third-party risk management best practices.
In the C3PRMP program, students focus on best and emerging practices to identify, assess, manage and control third-party risk throughout the lifecycle of relationships, and learn how to align risk fundamentals and frameworks with risk culture to develop the essential tools and controls for effective governance.
The digital age is seeing an increased dependence on third-party service providers of varying sizes – including start-ups – to meet the challenges of technological innovation, cost, demand for service excellence and heightened competition.
Organizations are often locked in a love-hate relationship with their vendors as they struggle to meet expectations, sometimes both ways. In today’s digital journey, no organization can thrive on its own. To create true value for your organization and help meet business objectives, your organization will need to build a lasting relationship with your third parties. Organizations will need to adopt the art and science of engagement.
The business ecosystem is experiencing a fundamental shift. Organizations are moving away from purely cost-savings partnerships to value-generating risk-sharing partnership models. As the third-party ecosystem grows, the ability to manage and govern third parties is becoming more critical to success.
What’s keeping you up at night? CPOs today are under continued pressure to reduce costs and find new sources of value – and of course, manage risk.
At the same time, CPOs want to become more strategic advisors to the business. We’ve found the perfect opportunity to help you achieve those goals and more.
As a CPO, you probably manage millions of dollars’ worth of spend on services. Think of all the money your company spends on consultancies, IT services providers, marketing agencies, law firms, accounting firms, facilities management companies and more. These services providers operate across the enterprise, perform vital work and deliver enormous value.
You manage the contracts and rates for these services, but beyond that, how much attention do you pay to that spend? Do you know whether these services providers are delivering high-quality work? Do they hit deadlines? Is your business getting good value for money?
Most of us are guilty of under-managing services providers. That’s one of the key findings from a groundbreaking new research study published by SAP Fieldglass in collaboration with Oxford Economics, titled Services Procurement Insights 2019: The Big Reveal.
Growing economic uncertainty, geopolitical unrest, and emerging cyber threats mean that security and risk management are now critical boardroom priorities. If that weren’t enough, businesses today are not only accountable for the factors that impact them directly, but they’re also responsible for those that impact their suppliers.
Take the recent Quest Diagnostics data breach as an example. Despite Quest’s strong internal cybersecurity infrastructure, the sensitive information of 11.9 million patients was hacked through a third-party billing vendor with subpar security standards. The lesson is clear: a company is only as safe as its weakest vendor.
Many organizations continue to manage suppliers, contracts, and procurement processes manually or with outdated, clunky technology that is too complicated for efficient use. These haphazard systems are, unfortunately, perfect harbors for risk, but there is tremendous opportunity here. According to a recent McKinsey & Company report, 56% of source-to-pay tasks could be “fully or largely automated using currently available technologies.”
While automation isn’t a cure-all, it does have the potential to drastically decrease overall risk. How? By reducing the “human factor” in supplier management and allowing sourcing employees to focus on more critical projects. In addition to putting risk mitigation at the forefront, automating supplier-related processes benefits businesses in these four key ways:
Chris Crane, Co-Founder, Product, Scout RFP, a Workday company
While enrolled in SIG University's Certified Third Party Risk Management Professional (C3PRMP) Program, Wendy Hsu was able to immediately apply what she learned and contribute her expertise toward sourcing a third-party risk management tool to develop her organization's Third Party Risk Management Program.
In the C3PRMP program, students focus on best and emerging practices to identify, assess, manage and control third-party risk throughout the lifecycle of relationships, and learn how to align risk fundamentals and frameworks with risk culture to develop the essential tools and controls for effective governance.
In more ways than one, the learning opportunity with SIG University’s Certified Third Party Risk Management Professional (C3PRMP) program was more than coincidental. Earlier in the year, I had chosen the C3PRMP program to fulfill my 2019 Individual Development Plan objective. Little did I know that by July I would be fully engaged in assisting my manager to source a suitable third-party risk management tool and develop a project plan to implement our future Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) program. While the timing of my taking the certification program couldn’t be better, the challenges ahead of my company’s TPRM program (which will soon be called Key Vendor Management Program) couldn’t be greater given we are a young company still in the process of shaping our risk culture and standardizing our vendor review process.
Wendy Hsu, Sr. IT Procurement Consultant, Venerable
SIG University Certified Third Party Risk Management Professional (C3PRMP) Program graduate Cindy Lingerfelt works at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida. She shares what she’s learned about third-party risk management and how her small team plans to build a stronger risk culture.
In the C3PRMP program, students focus on best and emerging practices to identify, assess, manage and control third-party risk throughout the lifecycle of relationships, and learn how to align risk fundamentals and frameworks with risk culture to develop the essential tools and controls for effective governance.
I work for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida on the Procurement team. My sub-team, Supplier Management, is small and we wear many hats. We were the first in our organization to implement some standardization for how critical suppliers were managed by developing a segmentation questionnaire to tier our suppliers and worked with business owners to get all Tier 1 suppliers on performance scorecards. Our role was to provide standard formatted scorecards with a library of the most common KPIs, stationary, QBR templates and more.
Due to an incident with a supplier, the board made a directive that supplier risk should have a more explicit focus. A new team called Enterprise Risk Management was formed within Corporate Affairs/Internal Audit to address supplier risk and closely partner with Procurement on new suppliers and manage risk with our current supplier base.
Cindy Lingerfelt, C3PRMP, Sourcing Specialist, Florida Blue
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Procurement Takes Center Stage
We live in a dynamic world where billions of people make billions of choices daily. The sheer multitude of choice makes it increasingly difficult to have shared experiences – those kind of global watershed moments that push change and innovation forward at an accelerated pace. Covid-19, in its own terrifying way, stopped us all and immediately narrowed our choices. But it also gave us one unified experience and one unified goal: Fight the virus, stop the spread.
A true global watershed moment had arrived. Suddenly, the whole world understood the importance of the supply chain. Procurement had been thrust onto center stage, and the spotlight was both harsh and illuminating.
Spotlight on Procurement
There’s no way to plan for every outcome. There just isn’t. No risk plan can predict the future with 100% accuracy. There’s no judgement to be laid at anyone’s doorstep. The impact of COVID-19 wasn’t something supply chain professionals could have easily seen coming. So, as the whole world watched the demand for certain products like N-95 masks, PPEs, disinfectant and toilet paper soar, they also saw the dramatic consequences of supply chains that weren’t built for pandemic-driven demand.
The links between the supply chain and business continuity, between business continuity and employment, between employment and economies, those links were now on stark display for everyone to see. Interdependencies that were once just the language of procurement professionals had become the common language of the world.