In industries where the stakes are high and the supply chains are long, due diligence is not a back-office formality. For a global industrial company operating across technology, mobility, and national infrastructure, managing third-party risk is as central to the business as the products it delivers. But a few years ago, the systems supporting that work were nowhere close to the scale the business demanded.
When the company's Head of Due Diligence joined six years ago, the situation was familiar to anyone who has worked in compliance at a large, fast-moving organization. "We were relying on spreadsheets, manual archives, and siloed workflows," she recalls. "Everything was decentralized. It created data chaos and made collaboration across units incredibly challenging."
That description, candid as it is, understates the real problem. The company was growing fast, accelerating acquisitions, and expanding its network of third parties in every direction. The volume of partners, vendors, and agents requiring screening was not dozens or even hundreds. It was thousands. And the tools in place simply could not keep up.
A TPRM Program Structure Built for Scale
What the team needed was not just better software. They needed a fundamentally different model for how compliance worked across the organization.
The company operates with a hybrid structure: a central corporate compliance team that sets standards and provides shared services, alongside local compliance officers embedded within individual business units. This federated model made sense for a company of this size and complexity. The challenge was making it work in practice, across geographies, procurement teams, sales functions, and executive leadership, all at once.
That is what led them to GAN Integrity. The platform gave the central team the visibility they needed while allowing local compliance officers to engage directly with the colleagues and third parties in their part of the business. Processes that had previously existed in isolation, or not at all, could now be tracked, managed, and completed in a single compliance system.
"Now, we can collaborate across compliance, purchasing, and business leaders in a single system," the Head of Due Diligence says, "and we can see where a process is stuck or what needs action. That visibility was impossible before."
Risk-Based Approach, Not One-Size-Fits-All
One of the most important shifts in the program was moving to a risk-based approach to due diligence. Not every third party carries the same level of risk, and treating them all the same was both inefficient and ineffective. The company now scores third parties using internal risk indicators including geography, corruption indices, ownership structures, ESG considerations, and human rights factors. That score determines the level of due diligence required and the internal approvals needed before a relationship proceeds.
The result is a program that concentrates resources where they matter most. "It enables us to focus on the risks that matter most," the Head of Due Diligence explains, "and we don't waste time chasing low-risk entities."
For higher-risk third parties, the team conducts enhanced due diligence. This means combining automated screening with data from Moody's RDC, self-disclosure questionnaires, and document collection. The platform documents the analysis, surfaces red flags, and generates recommendations for the business leaders who ultimately make the decision.
The compliance team provides the insight; the business retains the accountability. That division of responsibility, clearly defined and consistently applied, is what gives the program its credibility.
Efficiency Without Adding Headcount
One of the more striking outcomes of the transformation is what the team has been able to accomplish without growing. Bulk uploads and integrations with procurement and contract management systems have streamlined third-party onboarding.
Automated workflows handle the routing, tracking, and documentation that used to require manual effort at every step. Red-flag indicators are built directly into the process, so the right questions get asked at the right time rather than chased down after the fact.
"Prior to GAN Integrity, it just wasn't possible to manage this volume manually," the Head of Due Diligence notes. The team now manages thousands of third parties through the platform, and the compliance function has scaled alongside the business rather than falling behind it.
Compliance Reporting the Board Can Trust
Scaling a compliance program is one thing. Demonstrating its value to senior leadership is another. With executive-level dashboards built into the platform, the compliance team can now provide concise, meaningful updates to the board without hours of manual data compilation.
Leadership wants to understand where the risks are concentrated, which relationships are raising flags, and whether the overall program is working. GAN Integrity provides that picture clearly. "The board wants to know where the risks are. GAN Integrity helps us highlight red flags and show that the majority of our third parties are clean. That kind of clarity builds trust in our program."
That trust matters. A compliance program that cannot communicate its results is a program that will always be underfunded and undervalued.
Looking Ahead
The team is not finished evolving. The next phase of the TPRM program is focused on further automation, particularly around lower-risk third parties. The ambition is to use AI to cluster and monitor routine relationships, freeing up compliance capacity for the cases that genuinely require human judgment. "The goal is clear," the Head of Due Diligence says. "More efficiency, better focus, and stronger outcomes."
It is a vision that mirrors the broader direction of the compliance profession: not less human involvement, but smarter human involvement, applied where it creates the most value.
What Changed, and Why It Matters
The transformation at this global industrial company is a case study in what it takes to build a compliance program that actually functions at enterprise scale. It required a clear operating model, a platform flexible enough to support it, and a willingness to work through complexity rather than around it.
Customizing workflows for a program this large and this federated is not a plug-and-play exercise. But the partnership held. "GAN Integrity didn't shy away from that," the Head of Due Diligence says of the implementation process. "They helped us create something that works for us, not just something off the shelf."
The result is a program the team is genuinely proud of. One that is audit-ready, scalable, and trusted by the business it serves. In an industry where the cost of getting third-party risk wrong can be severe, that is not a small thing.
Interested in learning how a global industrial company transformed their TPRM program with GAN Integrity? Read the full customer story here.
Hannah Tichansky is the Senior Product Marketing Manager at GAN Integrity. Hannah holds over 14 years of writing and marketing experience, with 9 years of specialization in Governance, Risk, and Compliance. Hannah holds an MA from Monmouth University and a Certificate in Product Marketing from Cornell University.