Today’s procurement and risk professionals face an immense volume of third-party engagements. The average 1,000-person business is managing 400+ new requests for vendors each year, and they all need to be assessed and monitored on an ongoing basis. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated high-profile cyberattacks are in the news every week—targeting seemingly verticalised clusters. In the UK, most recently Marks & Spencer, the Co-op, and Harrods retail stores were all affected within a week, and similar attacks were reported on a string of US healthcare providers in 2024. Marks & Spencer reported that attackers gained access via a third party supplier, rather than by attacking systems directly—and expect the attack to cost them ~£300m. 

Between 2021 and 2023 attacks originating with a third-party vendor, known as “supply chain attacks” increased over 400%. Meaning businesses have to keep just as close an eye on their third-party vendors' risk posture as their own. To mount more pressure, new regulations, like DORA, are rapidly evolving to try and curb disruption to digital services. All to say, procurement and risk professionals have a lot to contend with, and that’s where third-party risk management processes come in. 

What is third-party risk management (TPRM)?

Third-party risk management programs identify and mitigate the risks that third-party suppliers pose to a business across security, operations, and compliance. TPRM is a critical part of corporate governance, with businesses needing to assess (and continuously reassess) thousands of external vendors to stay safe, and stay compliant.

Handling this scale of assessment in silos, with separate procurement or supplier management systems and TPRM systems, leads to inefficiencies, missed risks, and potential non-compliance—and it’s one of the core challenges I see businesses of all sizes contending with. Let’s dive into why.

Why is third-party risk management so complex?

Every third-party relationship is hierarchical and multifaceted. At the top level is the vendor (the external supplier), but beneath that lies a web of individual agreements, contracts, and services. These typically have a number of complex characteristics: 

  • Multiple agreements per vendor: A single vendor may have multiple contracts or engagements with your organization (e.g. a software supplier providing both a cloud service and a consulting project under separate agreements). Each agreement is a distinct relationship, often involving different internal teams or even different legal entities of the vendor engaging with different legal entities of your organization.
  • Distinct risk postures: Each agreement can carry its own risk profile. For instance, a cloud storage contract might involve sensitive customer data and have a high inherent risk, whereas a consulting contract with the same vendor involves no personal data, and resultantly have a much lower inherent risk. Even though the vendor is the same, the risk exposure varies dramatically between these two engagements.
  • Separate contracts and jurisdictions: These different agreements come with their own contracts and legal terms (e.g. DPAs). One contract might include stringent data protection clauses under EU law (GDPR), while another with the same vendor is governed by a different jurisdiction (e.g. U.S. law) with its own requirements. These differences mean each agreement brings its own compliance obligations and legal risk profile.

This complexity means each engagement must be assessed in its own context. Without a granular view, one might either label an entire vendor as high-risk (needlessly adding friction and bureaucracy to low-risk services) or, more likely, underestimate risk by averaging it out. Only by managing risk at the agreement/service level can an organization accurately identify which contracts pose the highest risk and make informed decisions. Granularity is crucial for precise risk management.

Why are siloed TPRM systems problematic?

A separate TPRM system creates data silos. Vendor data must be duplicated from the procurement platform to the risk tool, and updates often fall through the cracks. Even with an integration, third-party relationships don’t exist in a vacuum and a standalone tool lacks the richer data from procurement to fully inform risk. This separation can result in misaligned data and extra work to keep systems in sync.

Standalone TPRM workflows operate in isolation from procurement events. Onboardings should be captured by a strict process, but change orders, renewals and terminations are exceptionally difficult to track accurately in a separate tool. This lag means risk processes can be out-of-step with reality. Important context (like which internal team owns the vendor or what the contract’s scope is) may not be readily available in the risk tool. The outcome is a reactive approach that may be too slow or too generic to address specific agreement-level risks.

To illustrate the impact: imagine Vendor X has one low-risk and one high-risk engagement with your company. If that high-risk contract is terminated, the tool might still flag the vendor as high risk because it cannot automatically adjust to the new context given the Vendor hasn’t been offboarded entirely. On the other hand, if a new high-risk project starts with a Vendor that was previously low-risk, a siloed system might not immediately reflect that heightened risk as contract change management doesn’t necessarily trigger a risk update unless somebody remembers to do it! These gaps can lead to either over-managing or under-managing the vendor, translating to either lost opportunities and excess bureaucracy and administration from overestimating risk, or unwitting exposure from underestimating it.

What are the architectural benefits of an integrated TPRM and procurement platform?

Closely integrating the TPRM and procurement processes means the risk management process is embedded within the same system that handles vendor onboarding, contracting, and purchasing. This unified architecture brings several key advantages:

  • Unified, single source of truth: An integrated platform centralizes all vendor and contract information along with risk data. Vendor records and all their associated agreements (with risk scores, controls, documents, etc.) reside in one system. This hierarchical data model (vendor → agreements → products/services) naturally mirrors real-world relationships. It becomes easy to see an overall vendor profile with each contract’s specific risk details attached. The result is no duplicated data and a consistent view for all stakeholders.
  • Real-time lifecycle integration: Because procurement and risk workflows share a system, risk management moves in lockstep with the vendor lifecycle. When a new vendor request or contract record is created, the platform can automatically trigger relevant risk assessments and approvals. Likewise, if a contract is modified, renewed, or terminated, the risk records update immediately. This tight coupling ensures the risk status is always up-to-date and reflects the current state of each engagement. There’s no lag or manual handoff—the moment something changes (say, data usage or location), the integrated system captures it. In short, risk monitoring becomes a living process tied directly to procurement events.
  • Full context for decision-making: Integration brings rich context into the risk process. All the procurement metadata—spend category, criticality, contract value, involved departments, jurisdictions—is readily available to inform risk assessments. The platform ‘knows’ if a contract involves personal data or which business unit owns it, allowing it to tailor risk questionnaires and controls to that context. This comprehensive context leads to more accurate risk scoring, better prioritization, and stronger reporting (e.g. by risk category or region), since all relevant data is connected.

In summary, the integrated approach provides coherence to the overall process. All relevant entities and their relationships are captured in one place. The system is built to handle complexity by design, rather than forcing a standalone tool to track things it wasn’t designed for.

There are also significant operational improvements:

  • Speed: Risk checks and questionnaires launch automatically during the procurement intake. Approvers see the risk assessment results alongside the purchase request, ensuring due diligence is completed within the normal approval chain. There’s no confusion over what’s been assessed, accelerating the overall process.
  • Efficiency: Duplicate data entry and manual back-and-forth are eliminated. The procurement team doesn’t have to re-enter vendor info separately into a risk system or remind risk analysts to start an assessment - the platform handles it automatically. This cuts down not only on administrative effort, but errors too. All stakeholders (procurement, IT security, legal, etc.) can work from the same platform, seeing updates in real time and collaborating on a single record. Communication overhead also drops, because everyone can check the system to see a consolidated status or leave comments for other stakeholders with the context already there. The result is better alignment - every stakeholder is on the same page throughout the vendor being onboarded and managed.
  • Proactivity: With an integrated platform, third-party risk management becomes an ongoing, proactive process. The system can schedule periodic reassessments or prompt for updated information before a contract renewal, ensuring ongoing monitoring happens on time and is tied to each contract’s lifecycle. Additionally, if a vendor’s situation changes (e.g. they suffer a data breach or are subject to a new regulatory requirement), the integrated system can immediately pinpoint which active agreements are affected. Teams can then respond quickly, focusing effort exactly where it’s needed without cross-referencing multiple systems. This agility in addressing emerging risks (or in off-boarding a vendor across all contracts if needed) is a major operational advantage. The organization becomes more resilient because all the intel needed to act is consolidated and readily accessible in one place.

Overall, the operational gains from integration translate to faster onboarding, fewer bottlenecks, and more proactive risk management. TPRM ceases to be a separate checkbox and becomes an integral, transparent part of the procurement lifecycle.

Another driver of an integrated approach is the regulatory landscape: laws like DORA in the EU demand granular oversight of each outsourcing arrangement, which is only practical when risk management is embedded in procurement workflows.

Integration also aligns with the strategic evolution of procurement. It ensures that every buying decision is automatically evaluated for risk, creating a culture of informed procurement (and reducing the chance of rogue or risky vendor use). In addition, an integrated platform offers a 360° view of vendor relationships by correlating spend, performance, and risk data in one place. This holistic insight helps in making better decisions – from choosing vendors to negotiating renewals.

How can Omnea’s embedded approach to TPRM help? 

Integrating third-party risk management into the procurement platform is a far superior strategy to using a standalone TPRM tool. It acknowledges the granularity of vendor risk (down to each contract and service) and ensures no nuance is lost. With integration, companies gain both a unified data architecture and streamlined operations—resulting in more accurate risk assessments, faster onboarding, and stronger compliance. Standalone solutions, by contrast, leave critical gaps and force a trade-off between oversimplification and inefficiency. The future of procurement and risk management is one of convergence. Organizations that unite these functions will be better equipped to govern third-party relationships in a precise, proactive, and business-aligned manner. At Omnea, we’ve built deep Supplier Risk Management functionality—allowing businesses to seamlessly embed TPRM within the procurement process. We’re trusted by highly regulated financial services businesses, high-growth tech and cybersecurity businesses, and everyone in between. If you’d like to learn more about our TPRM functionality—please get in touch.