Aravo Empowers Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Companies with Data-Driven Third-Party Risk Management Solutions
Helps Manage Supply Chain Disruption, Performance, and Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption Risks
SAN FRANCISCO – Sept. 27, 2023 – Aravo, the leading provider of third-party risk and resilience solutions, today announced continued adoption of the Aravo platform from pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. Aravo for Third Party Management enables pharmaceutical firms and their extended enterprise to focus on its mission of delivering quality of life, knowing that they can rely on their third-party and supplier networks.
According to Forrester’s Business Risk Survey, 2022,1 reliance on third parties and financial instability are top drivers of increased risk. Specifically within pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations, the following third-party risks are emerging:
- Supply Chain Disruption. Pharmaceutical companies rely heavily on complex global supply chains for raw materials, active ingredients, and finished products. Disruptions due to geopolitical tensions, natural disasters, or logistical challenges can impact the production and distribution of drugs.
“According to the 2021 Gartner® Supply Chain Signature Series Risk Survey, 68% of supply chain leaders reported that they have been constantly responding to high-impact disruptions between 2019 and 2020.2 In that same time period, 67% reported they have not had sufficient time to recover before another high-impact event has disrupted their supply chains.”
Gartner also said,3 “…And from a supply chain cost perspective, supply chain leaders reported a 4% average increase in cost to serve after an unfamiliar disruption to their supply chain. With the increase in the rate of disruption, and the constant presence of disruption, that 4% increase is no longer a temporary cost to service customers during a disruption. In practice, it is a permanent increase, unsustainable with the sheer volume of risks disrupting the supply chain.”
- Performance Risk. Third parties involved in pharmaceutical supply chains that do not meet quality standards can result in defective or unsafe drugs posing serious risks to patient health and damage to the company’s reputation. Performance management is the ability to visualize, track and report on key performance indicators (such as SLAs) and qualitative ratings (such as internal stakeholder feedback) by supplier and/or contract. Risks can increase when metrics used don’t reflect the full value provided by third parties or when organizations don’t provide suppliers with details of their performance consistently and timely.
- Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption (ABAC) Risk. Governments around the world are getting stricter about enforcing ABAC regulations which forbid bribery and corruption by organizations and their third parties, including suppliers, wholesalers, pharmacies, and marketing agencies. Penalties can be steep—criminal fines up to $2 million per violation for entities; up to $250,000 per violation and up to five years in prison for individuals. Violators may be barred from bidding on government contracts or holding export privileges. With constrained supply chains, limited government contracts and permits, and backlogs in customs for import/export, pharmaceutical firms are facing a greater risk of bribery and corruption.
“Aravo’s suite of third-party risk management (TPRM) solutions are designed to help pharmaceutical and life sciences organizations manage and mitigate risks, helping them deliver life-saving products,” said Dean Alms, chief product officer at Aravo. “Our automated platform provides the ability to capture and retrieve TPRM, ESG, and ethics data enabling our customers to work with their suppliers in meeting delivery expectations through SLAs, assurances, quality controls, and transparent reporting.”
Four of the five largest pharmaceutical companies in the world use Aravo for third-party risk management. Key benefits of the Aravo platform include:
- Unified visibility into all third parties and their profiles across 36 risk domains, including financial viability, legal status, ABAC, cybersecurity, data privacy, ESG and regulatory compliance, throughout the lifecycle of the relationship.
- Continuous third-party monitoring with integrations to periodic and real-time risk intelligence data to identify which of the critical third parties present the highest risk and proactively mitigate through corrective actions.
- Aravo for Supply Chain Resilience, a pre-built application that provides a supplier-oriented view of hazards that could impact supply chains. Through an integration with DisasterAWARE, Aravo sends alerts and automates the process for launching, scoring and reviewing business impact assessments of affected third parties. If an incident requires mitigation, Aravo automates the steps within the action plan such as identifying alternative suppliers to quickly recover from the disruption.
- Aravo for Performance Management, which monitors third-party performance to strengthen preferred supplier relationship and drive supplier innovation.
- A pre-built application to accelerate implementation of an ABAC TPRM program. Aravo for ABAC Compliance includes a comprehensive questionnaire that maps to industry guidance and standards set by the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, U.K. Bribery Act, and ISO 37001.
- Complete auditability of the entire process to support both internal and external audits. Aravo supports multiple audit trail views which include capabilities to track system configuration changes and how risk models have evolved over time.
- Aravo’s Strategic Alignment Framework™, an adaptive methodology that helps prioritize business and operational objectives, drives organizational alignment and establishes a master blueprint and phased roadmap to achieve a customer’s long-term TPRM vision.
Additional Resources
About Aravo
Aravo delivers the smartest third-party risk and resilience solutions, powered by intelligent automation. As a centralized system of record for all third-party data, Aravo provides organizations with a complete view of their third-party ecosystem throughout the lifecycle of the relationship and across multiple risk domains including ABAC, ESG, data privacy, InfoSec, financial, ethics, supply chain resilience, and business continuity. For more than 20 years, Aravo’s award-winning technology and unrivaled domain expertise have helped the world’s most respected brands accelerate and optimize their third-party management programs, delivering better business outcomes faster and ensuring the agility to adapt as programs evolve. Learn more at aravo.com.
1 Forrester Research, The State of Enterprise Risk Management, Aug. 23, 2023
2, 3 Gartner, Shaping Disruption: A New Strategy for Supply Chain Risk Management, Dec. 21, 2022
GARTNER is a registered trademarks of Gartner Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and/or internationally and has been used herein with permission.
