ESG vendor profiles of IntegrityNext, riskmethods, Robobai, GoSupply, and Resilinc: How risk management solutions address sustainability efforts

This Spend Matters PRO post is part of our series on ESG technology and the need to measure companies’ increasing focus on sustainability efforts in all of their business processes. The series recently focused on ESG & source-to-pay suite providers and ESG & supplier management vendors. Today, the ESG series focuses on risk management providers like IntegrityNext, riskmethods, Robobai, GoSupply and Resilinc.

Risk management solutions with ESG coverage are closely related with the more general risk-monitoring providers. These solutions combine supplier-submitted data with external/third-party data (e.g., government agency lists, semantic monitoring of news/social media) to assess risks with suppliers or, in several cases, the broader supply chain.

Customers expect that if a supplier has a compliance failure or an adverse event that could affect supply, risk management solutions like these will alert them immediately. Similarly, customers expect these solutions to serve as the setters of baseline knowledge about their suppliers. For example, if a supplier is misaligned with ESG goals, such as a lapse in submitting carbon emission reduction action plans, then these solutions will notify users of a missing plan submission and will facilitate remediation.

Because of their core monitoring focus, many risk management solutions face challenges in breadth of coverage. While risk management providers cover some ESG areas very well, none cover all areas exhaustively, and there are always specialists that go “deeper” on certain ESG areas. The reliance on supplier-submitted data and third parties alone provides baseline coverage, not deep ESG actions.

Another key flaw, seen also with providers of offerings for source-to-pay (S2P) and supplier management (SXM), is that these solutions rely on Tier 1 suppliers identifying Tier 2 suppliers (and so on) to get multi-tier visibility. Interestingly, supply chain visibility specialists excel on this challenge, but are less capable at risk monitoring. Based on roadmap disclosures, however, we see indications that risk management providers are increasingly working to create network effects or incentives for lower-tier suppliers to generate n-tier visibility, which should alleviate this weakness in the future.

Let’s take a look at five risk vendors and their ESG capabilities.