It is an obvious fact that starting a new business venture or running a corporation comes with its own set of risks. These risks come from a variety of different sources, be they internal or external. It is important for any business to identify and mitigate these risks for furthering the company’s performance and goodwill.
AuditComply is an Integrated Risk Management (IRM) platform that brings customized solutions to these risks unique to every company. The company is a cloud-based SaaS solution changing the way companies assess, manage, and report on Risk, Compliance, and Quality functions in real-time across all organizational assets.
In an interview with Insights Success, Kevin Donaghy, the Chief Executive Officer of AuditComply elaborates on how the company is disrupting the supply chain solutions space through its excellent personalized services for each client.
Please brief our audience about AuditComply, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the supply chain solutions space.
We are a leading SaaS-based Risk & Audit Management platform, trusted by the world’s largest Fortune 1000 Companies. The team, headquartered in Belfast, Ireland, services organizations globally and is actively managing and maintaining their Risk and Audit programs to ensure they are meeting the highest standards from a GRC (Governance, Risk & Compliance) and internal policy perspective. We provide a scalable management solution with an unmatched user experience to encourage greater adoption across all key business areas.
Our customer’s environments change every day, and we continue to improve the system to stay ahead of these demands. Our goal is to allow our customers to embrace change without recording or additional IT intervention. We aim to build our roadmap around well-qualified customer requirements, whilst maintaining a strategic goal to be a leader in enterprise risk management underpinned by world-class auditing. Our customers are the measure of our success together (Shell, UKAS, Weightmans, Sysco, Autoliv, and more).
Today we’re operating in highly regulated industries where the effects of poor Risk Management can be detrimental, from fines and litigation to loss of life. This includes Automotive, Food & Beverage, Oil & Gas, Finance, and Manufacturing, with key customers situated throughout the UK, EU, US, Middle East, and the Asia Pacific regions.
Our dedicated third-party risk management capabilities help connect the dots of an originally fragmented and disconnected process, helping reduce the uncertainty and complexity across the supply chain. By taking advantage of our dedicated supplier portals, customizable supplier assessments, risk hubs, configurable workflows, and an in-house advisory team, companies can expect to effectively manage, monitor, and track all the stages of their supplier relationships.
Supply Chain Risk platforms like ourselves ensure companies can have real-time visibility of current risks, can predict future disruptions, and identify opportunities. Protecting revenue, reputation, and resilience.
What other services does AuditComply offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?
We have successfully introduced AuditComply into all our client environments. For the most part, they had an initial focus around one particular aspect, be it Internal Auditing, Quality Management, Risk, Supply Chain, or EH&S amongst others.
From there, our clients have adapted the solution to other aspects of their business needs, quickly realizing their investment in multiple areas whilst having oversight at an executive level. Providing the customer with better assessments of their assets in terms of quality, auditing, compliance, and risk.
At an individual level, each of the user personas has gained massive efficiencies in the administration, conducting, reporting, and analysis of the data. Ultimately allowing the auditors to spend more time auditing to a higher level whilst the admin and reporting are automated.
Since our birth, AuditComply has been providing a solution to supply chain challenges. We work closely with Autoliv to assess thousands of global suppliers. We have enough experience to meet this challenge head-on. AuditComply understands first-hand the increasing reliance on suppliers.
Organizations are outsourcing their operations to drive costs down without actually compromising their quality of services/products. This strategy has increased the value of the supplier role but as a consequence has increased the threats and third-party risks organizations are exposed to, turning global supply chains into ungovernable networks with limited visibility.
Just read the research, on average, companies spend the US $2.1 million annually to vet their third parties but only 51% of companies employ risk scanning tools. Worse, 54% state these results are only somewhat valuable or don’t provide any insights at all.
More than 80% of legal and compliance leaders told Gartner that third-party risks were identified after the initial onboarding and due diligence, suggesting traditional due diligence methods in risk management policy fail to capture new and evolving risks.
Clearly, the above statistics illustrate why third-party risk management is rapidly becoming a priority challenge alongside IT Risk Management.
We’re helping organizations meeting this challenge head-on. Providing a dedicated Risk & Audit Management platform to monitor third-party risk. Rapidly improving operating efficiencies, reducing costs while making operations more adaptable to changes in the internal and external environment.
The network of third-party relationships an organization harness is an important strategic advantage that’s unique to their company but only if risk and supply chain leaders have real-time oversight. The key to AuditComply’s success has always been the customer. Continuously meeting the requirements of their evolving risk environment.
We never sit still, we’re innovators, using digital transformation to drive our customers forward. Knowing our customers and building relationships with our customers has always been key to our success. Our team is diligent, focused and makes the customer the center of everything we do. We’re disciplined in our approach.
We always welcome the opportunity to work with our customers to tailor the solution to their needs. More importantly, we build a partnership to develop best-of-breed auditing that will ultimately help their customers and ours, ensuring better outcomes for all. We’re proud to say, AuditComply has a 98%+ customer retention rate.
Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact have the adoption of modern technologies such as AI, big data, and machine learning had on the supply chain niche, and what more could be expected in the future?
With faster broadband, inexpensive hardware, AI and data-driven intelligence, the pace of innovation is speeding up. Yet as the world embraces digital transformation, we are also taking on more risk than ever before.
As new IT infrastructure and technologies are introduced, including the emergence of AI, Mobile & RPA, Cyber, and Third-Party Risk have quickly jumped to number one on the agenda.
This year alone we witnessed the effects of supply chain disruptions from the shortage in microchips to the blockage in the Suez Canal. The problem isn’t the gathering of data but what we do with it. We need to continuously learn, chart, plot and analyse what the data is telling us.
With the likes of AI, Big Data, and Machine Learning, we are more prepared than ever to identify trends, predict disruptions, learn from our mistakes, and move forward faster and more efficiently by using this data to identify opportunities.
Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face and how did you drive AuditComply to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time?
Internally, as a software development company, we were perfectly placed to move our operations to a work-at-home system. To ensure effective communication between employees in our company, staff meetings are conducted twice a day, which allows employees to update each other on their progress in different tasks and to coordinate their work effectively.
Staff also has the choice to work in our office if they wish to, where we have the correct safety measure put into places, such as social distancing and the provision of face masks and hand sanitizer.
What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the supply chain space?
You have nothing to lose. For years, we’ve taken logistics for granted and the pandemic has forced us to rethink it. The 21st century is going to be about supply chains and if you’re solving a problem in this arena, you have nothing to lose. It’s okay to make mistakes as an entrepreneur.
Take your idea, then really test, test it early, test it again and talk to the customer. Every customer challenge will be unique and it’s all about solving a problem. Understand who is going to buy from you and why they are going to buy. Forget everything else, if you’re solving a true industrial problem, everything else will fall into place. Get into the mindset of learning from your mistakes, be willing to adapt, and be disciplined in your approach.
AuditComply is an incredibly agile platform for a reason, allowing us to adapt to the evolving environments of our customers. It’s no secret, AuditComply was built by Risk & Audit experts – you will see it in the details, from the assessment template builder to how the data is reported and analysed. We will continue to use the feedback and information gleaned from the process to shape our research and development initiatives.
How do you envision scaling AuditComply’s operations and offerings in 2021?
AuditComply has always had a great vision of what the future of Risk and Audit Management is going to look like. Third-Party Risk and ESG will be key roadmap drivers and will likely dictate the markets we focus on and where operations will be expanded.
An Eminent Leader
CEO of AuditComply, Kevin Donaghy, has led teams and companies from the earliest stages of development through commercialization and hyper-growth phases. He started his career with WPDS in San Diego as a software engineer focused on Equipment Configuration Management systems for air forces across the globe. He then went on to run multiple teams for Spirent Communications and then founded Swan Labs, which was then acquired by F5 Networks in 2005.
In 2007, he founded Replify, which focused on mobility optimization and virtualization. Kevin has worked for web security firm Blue Coat Systems on mobile optimization strategy and on multiple projects, such as security and online GRC Platforms.
Exhibiting Excellence
- “As a large organization with access to sensitive data and responsibility for hundreds of people, it is crucial that we have systems in place which protect our brand, our employees, and our clients from risk. This partnership with AuditComply reinforces our commitment to becoming a truly tech-enabled law firm – it will not only ensure that we are well equipped to deal with our own exposure to risk quickly and effectively, but that we can take a streamlined approach to assist our customers with their own responsibilities and obligations.” – Stuart Whittle, Director of Business Services and Innovation at Weightmans
- “AuditComply is playing a crucial role in changing the quality & compliance culture. A world-class system, a game-changer in our industry. We required a solution that was mobile, automated our data, and could be accessed in real-time to ensure we are meeting quality standards across the supply chain. AuditComply delivered. Everyone that encounters AuditComply immediately loves it.” – Johnny Elgin, Sysco
- “The team is responsive and quick to our needs. There’s an underrated passion for the development of the solution. I would dread to think about what our operations would be like without implementing AuditComply. We’re working to introduce AuditComply into other departments”. – Natalie Elgin, Natalie Regan, Environmental, Health and Safety Manager at McCloskey International
- “AuditComply’s solution has greatly improved our productivity for both internal audits and production checklists. We found the assistance in moving our existing audits to their solution excellent and seamless. For the little support we have required since moving, their response times and resolutions have been exceptional. Their approach and services simply work.” – Michael Caughey, IT Support Specialist at Bushmills
