Monitoring your third-party risk
Summarize
Summary of Monitoring your third-party risk
The Third-party Risk Management (TPRM) application in ServiceNow enables you to continuously monitor potential risks associated with your third-party relationships. This ongoing process ensures that third parties comply with agreed-upon terms and helps you maintain control over vendor risk and resilience.
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Key Features
- Vendor Management Workspace: Provides a centralized space to monitor and review third-party performance, risk reports, and engagements. It features a vertical navigation panel for easier access to related records, assessments, and dashboards, enhancing workflow clarity and consistency across user roles such as TPR managers, assessors, and reviewers.
- Risk Reporting: Allows you to view comprehensive risk reports by navigating to the Risk tab within the Vendor Management Workspace, enabling quick identification and detailed review of third parties or engagements by risk rating.
- Personalized Dashboards: TPR managers and assessors can create, customize, and share dashboards and reports that focus on key metrics and workflows, improving decision-making with tailored insights at various organizational levels.
- Due Diligence Monitoring: You can track the status of critical due diligence processes—including request handling, inherent risk questionnaires, risk assessments, approvals, and contract risk—directly from Due Diligence Request record pages.
- Managing Fourth-nth Parties: Extends risk management to entities beyond direct third parties to ensure compliance and security standards are upheld throughout the supply chain.
- Third-party Elements Monitoring: Supports enhanced risk assessments through scoring models, relationship analysis, and integrated due diligence workflows focused on specific third-party components.
- Smart Assessment Templates: After upgrading to version 22.0.1 with Unified Content Management installed, TPR managers can access a centralized library of assessment templates aligned with global standards, which can be activated and updated within the Vendor Management Workspace.
- Managed Activities Tracking: Usage of managed activities is tracked via a read-only analytics table, accessible to users with the Third-party assessment reviewer role, helping verify activity consumption and license usage.
Practical Benefits
- Regularly assess third-party adherence to contracts and mitigate risks proactively.
- Utilize improved navigation and reporting tools to streamline vendor risk management workflows.
- Leverage customizable dashboards for focused insights that align with your organizational risk priorities.
- Monitor due diligence and compliance processes efficiently to ensure thorough risk evaluation.
- Extend risk oversight to dependent fourth-nth parties to maintain supply chain integrity.
- Access and manage up-to-date assessment templates to standardize evaluations according to industry best practices.
- Track managed activity usage transparently to optimize license management and operational oversight.
Access and Roles
Access to features like the Vendor Management Workspace, dashboards, and managed activity analytics is role-based. Key roles include Third-party risk (TPR) manager, TPR assessor, and Third-party assessment reviewer. Some capabilities require installation of additional applications like Unified Content Management or Due diligence management and possession of the Third-party Risk Management application license.
You can monitor the potential risks that are associated with your third-party relationships by using the Third-party Risk Management application. An ongoing monitoring process can help you regularly assess the third party's performance and adherence to the agreed-upon terms.
Ongoing monitoring and review
You can monitor and review the performance of your third parties with Vendor Management Workspace. For example, you can regularly assess whether the third party is adhering to the agreed-upon terms.
Viewing risk reports and other information
- Grouped Related Lists: Organizes access to third-party records, assessments, and dashboards into logical sections.
- Clearer Workflows: Navigation is streamlined to support risk management processes and dependency tracking for third parties and engagements.
- Consistent Availability: The vertical panel is accessible across all internal user roles, ensuring a unified experience for managing vendor risk and resilience.
You can view the risk reports for all third parties and engagements by navigating to and then selecting the Risk tab to open the workspace to the home page. For more information, see Viewing third-party risk reports.
You can also view the status and all current information for a third party or engagement by navigating to . On the Risk tab, select the home page icon 
.
TPRM personalized dashboards
Monitor and analyze your assessment data at various levels using the Third-party insights dashboard and TPRM custom analytics dashboard. If you have the TPR manager [sn_vdr_risk_asmt.vendor_risk_manager] or TPR assessor [sn_vdr_risk_asmt.vendor_assessor] role, you can create and share
your own dashboards and reports. TPR managers can also customize report layouts, widgets, and data views to prioritize key metrics and workflows that align with your individual roles and risk programs. These dashboards
provide you and your team with tailored insights and deliver relevant information at a glance, improving your decision-making process. You can view TPRM personalized dashboards by navigating to and selecting the dashboard page icon 
. For more information, see Monitoring assessment data using TPRM dashboards.
Due diligence processes
- Request process
- Inherent Risk Questionnaire (IRQ) process
- Third-party risk assessment process
- Approval process
- Contract risk process
Managing fourth-nth parties
You can use Third-party Risk Management to help identify, understand, and manage risks that are related to third parties dependent on the services of fourth-nth parties. Monitoring fourth-nth parties can help ensure that they adhere to the same security and compliance standards as the primary third party. For more information about fourth-nth parties, see Monitoring your fourth-nth parties.
Managing third-party elements
You can monitor third-party elements through scalable scoring models, relationship analysis, and due diligence workflow integration as part of the third-party element collection process. Monitoring third-party elements and leveraging that information can help with conducting more informed risk assessments as part of your third-party risk program. For more information about third-party elements, Monitoring third-party elements.
Managing Smart assessment templates
After upgrading to version 22.0.1 and installing the Unified Content Management application, TPR managers [sn_vdr_risk_asmt.vendor_risk_manager] can view a centralized library of smart assessment templates aligned with global
regulations and industry standards. From the unified content management module in the Vendor Management Workspace you can activate and update templates. You can access the unified content module by navigating to , select the unified content management icon 
and then navigate to Smart assessment templates. For more information, see Managing TPRM SAE templates with Unified Content Management and Sample questionnaires.
Viewing managed activities
An engagement only consumes one license, regardless of whether there’s one managed activity or many managed activities per contract year. Managed activity usage is triggered only when an activity is initiated. You can view your managed activities for verification purposes with the Usage analytics activities [sn_vdr_risk_asmt_ua_activity] table. This read-only table stores a record whenever a managed activity occurs. You must have the Third-party assessment reviewer [sn_vdr_risk_asmt.vendor_assessment_reviewer] role to view this table. You can access the Usage analytics activities table by navigating to . For more information, see Tracking a managed activity.