Bringing supplier-risk assessment forward into onboarding

Diagnose the operating problem

The current-state investigation established an approximately 90-day reporting cycle and inadequate visibility into which suppliers represented risk and the exposure they could create.

I examined what the business needed to know, which tools and systems users worked in, how they preferred to work, and where the process failed to provide useful visibility. The aim was to meet people where they worked without imposing a technology-first answer.

Organize the response

I organized the approach in three phases and divided implementation into separate operational and analytical workstreams.

• Establish what could be known from the data already available, including its limits.
• Identify the known unknowns and keep important unanswered business questions visible.
• Implement the operational and analytical changes needed to address the identified problems and gaps.

Represent risk without false precision

We replaced a disputed single-value risk score with tiered classifications based on supplier risk characteristics. The design made the representation more useful to the business without presenting an unsupported probability or a level of precision the evidence did not justify.

Connect data quality to operational correction

I created a data-quality dashboard that did more than identify issues. Data-quality findings were connected to recommended upstream corrections for operational users, linking analytical visibility to the people positioned to improve the source process.

The dashboard connected findings with recommended corrections for operational users; it did not automatically execute those corrections.

Bring the decision forward

Onboarding inputs could be used to classify prospective suppliers and identify riskier ones before they entered Microsoft's system. The outcome was earlier decision support during onboarding, rather than a claim about a specific report-generation turnaround.