Citicus to help organisations address the increasing level of supplier risks they face, caused by the volatile economic climate

Citicus Limited http://www.citicus.com has extended its risk and compliance management tool, Citicus ONE, to enable organisations to assess, manage and minimise the risks associated with their critical suppliers and the services they provide. As well as evaluating risks posed by existing suppliers, organisations can use Citicus ONE as a key part of their supplier selection process. 

Simon Oxley, managing director of Citicus, explains, “The volatile economic climate is creating a boom in supplier failures, presenting increased risk for organisations that outsource. The impact of supplier failure on organisations can be devastating - resulting in loss of customer service, reputational damage and lost revenue. Crucially, maintaining a current view of the operational and financial position of suppliers, by proactively identifying potential issues and threats, is proving to be a major challenge for organisations.”

Citicus ONE approaches supplier risk by ‘unpacking’ the supplier relationship and the individual services being provided – with measurement of the business criticality of different suppliers and supplied services. Citicus ONE employs succinct criticality assessments, risk scorecards and incident assessments – supported by harm reference tables and detailed checklists – to measure supplier risk in objective, business terms.

Marco Kapp, who led development of the tool explains, "The risk posed by a major supplier can be divided into a series of localized evaluations, and results aggregated to provide an overall picture of risk.  This enables users of our software to evaluate the risk posed by suppliers of all sizes, delivering goods and service in different parts of the world."

Organisations can identify and assess controls that need to be implemented by both the supplier and the receiver of a service and monitor the special factors that can drive supplier risk up or down, such as geo-political, cultural and business practice differences. Incidents associated with suppliers and services can be tracked and their business impact assessed. Citicus ONE uses unique dependency risk mapping to track the inter-connectivity of an organisation’s internal and external suppliers of services and the business processes or IT systems that they support.

Citicus ONE’s approach to supplier risk is integrated with its widely-implemented capabilities for managing information risk. The management of these critical areas of risk through a common approach enables organisations to gain an aggregated view of their overall exposure to risk and its main drivers. This in turn, can help organisations to identify and track risk mitigation and remediation activities.

Citicus ONE generates highly visual, informative results, including risk and compliance status and trend reports, heat maps, dependency risk maps, risk dashboards, risk league tables, guidance on driving down risks, incident statistics and action plans. Multiple reporting levels ensure that all levels of management are informed of the status of risk and compliance in their areas of responsibility.