Organizations today move fast, but slow vendor approvals can grind everything to a halt. As companies increasingly rely on third-party vendors, slow vendor approvals create a serious security bottleneck. This slowdown costs organizations valuable time and resources—and leaves them open to security risks.
It’s important to cohesively review and approve vendors to manage third-party risk, but organizations should be aware of just how long those approvals take. In this blog, we’ll uncover the hidden cost of slow vendor approvals and new approaches to help speed up the onboarding process—without compromising security.
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The hidden cost of slow vendor approvals
Vendor approvals are a critical part of an organization’s onboarding process. These approvals comprehensively review a vendor’s security posture, compliance standards, and other assets that could impact their relationship with an organization.
At first glance, a drawn-out vendor approval process might seem like a minor inconvenience. But over time, the cumulative impact can be significant—affecting your ability to move quickly, innovate effectively, and manage risk. The real cost of slow vendor approvals isn’t just time—it’s missed opportunities, operational setbacks, and increased exposure to unvetted third parties.
Operational delays
When security reviews take weeks, entire projects can be put on hold. Whether marketing needs a new SaaS tool or IT needs a critical infrastructure partner, delays in onboarding vendors slow everything down. Internal stakeholders grow frustrated, timelines slip, and momentum stalls—all because of a manual or inefficient approval process.
Operational delays are a common outcome of slow vendor approvals. Since vendors can’t offer their services to your organization until fully approved, a slow approval process creates delays across potentially vital parts of your organization. What should be a strategic gatekeeping process becomes a roadblock to progress.
Missed opportunities
Slow vendor approvals don’t just delay operations—they can cause your organization to miss out on strategic opportunities altogether. When approvals take weeks, promising partnerships skid to a halt, projects get postponed, and time-sensitive initiatives risk falling through. In fast-moving industries, that kind of friction can be the difference between leading the market and playing catch-up.
Procurement and business teams may bypass formal processes just to keep things moving, introducing unvetted vendors and increasing shadow IT risk. Worse, they may abandon valuable vendors entirely in favor of faster alternatives—regardless of quality or security. A sluggish approval process ultimately undermines business agility and competitiveness.
Increased risk exposure
Ironically, the longer a vendor approval takes, the more risk your organization may be exposed to. Extended timelines mean third parties are operating in a gray area—neither fully approved nor actively monitored. This limbo state leaves your organization vulnerable, especially if vendors begin work before final clearance.
Additionally, a slow, manually-driven process often lacks consistency. Critical risk signals can be missed, and important documentation may get lost in email threads or spreadsheets. This gap not only increases the chance of onboarding risky vendors but also complicates audits and compliance efforts down the line.
Automation: The key to real-time risk assessment
Manual vendor approvals often involve long email threads, disconnected spreadsheets, and delays that drag the process out for weeks. The solution? Automation. By eliminating repetitive tasks and enabling real-time risk analysis, automation transforms Vendor Risk Management into a faster, more efficient, and more scalable process.
What is automation in vendor approvals?
Automation refers to the use of software to eliminate the manual tasks traditionally associated with vendor risk assessments. Instead of chasing down documentation, updating spreadsheets, or customizing workflows for each new vendor, teams can rely on automated tools to streamline these activities (speeding up vendor approvals in the process).
Common automation features include dynamic intake forms that collect the right information upfront, auto-classification of vendors based on predefined risk criteria, and workflow routing that sends vendors through the appropriate review process. Many platforms also integrate threat intelligence or security ratings to provide instant visibility into a vendor’s risk posture—before anyone on your team needs to get involved.
The result is a system-guided evaluation process that removes friction, reduces turnaround time, and enables smarter, faster decisions.
How automation enhances the vendor approvals process
One of automation's biggest benefits is its ability to remove manual bottlenecks that slow down approvals. Instead of forwarding intake forms through multiple inboxes or reviewing each vendor’s documentation line by line, automation allows vendors to be instantly triaged based on risk level—fast-tracking low-risk vendors while ensuring higher-risk ones are routed for deeper assessment.
Automation also enables parallel processing. Security scanning, questionnaire completion, and risk analysis can all happen simultaneously rather than waiting for one step to finish before starting the next. Parallel processing not only saves time but also provides real-time visibility into where each vendor is in the approval process.
Automated workflows also create consistency by applying the same logic and standards across every vendor, reducing the chance of human error or oversight. This consistency makes it easier to scale the program as your third-party ecosystem grows—and frees up your security team to focus on high-impact tasks instead of chasing down paperwork.
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Security ratings: Your fast-pass to vendor onboarding
Security ratings are a powerful tool for security teams needing to quickly assess which vendors require deeper review–and which ones don’t. These ratings provide instant insight into a vendor’s external security posture, allowing security teams to triage more efficiently and fast-track low-risk vendors through the approvals process.
What are security ratings?
Security ratings offer a high-level snapshot of a vendor’s cyber hygiene by continuously monitoring their external-facing assets. These ratings typically present this information as a numerical score or letter grade, making it easy for teams to interpret at a glance.
Security ratings are generated using a variety of data points, like SSL configurations, DNS records, exposed ports, and historical breach data. While these ratings don’t replace in-depth assessments, they do give your team a head start by identifying obvious red flags (or green lights) before you dig deeper.
How security ratings accelerate approvals
One key method for speeding up vendor approvals is prioritizing vendors by their security rating. Vendors with strong ratings can be fast-tracked or onboarded with lighter-touch reviews, while those with low scores can be flagged for additional scrutiny. This triage approach ensures resources are spent where they matter most rather than applying the same level of diligence to every third party.
Security ratings also bring consistency and objectivity to the initial review process. Instead of relying on subjective judgment or incomplete questionnaires, security teams gain a standardized benchmark to compare vendors at scale.
However, security ratings should always be part of a broader risk management strategy—not the whole picture. Ratings are most effective when used alongside other tools in a third-party risk management program, like security questionnaires, risk assessments, and continuous monitoring. Security ratings act as an intelligent first filter—accelerating decision-making without compromising security.
Four steps to streamline vendor approvals
Streamlining vendor approvals doesn’t mean compromising on security. The key to accelerating vendor onboarding is building an efficient, scalable, and risk-aware system. By taking these four steps below, organizations can accelerate onboarding while still meeting their compliance and security requirements.
Standardize your vendor intake process
When intake is inconsistent, security teams waste time chasing down missing details. A standardized intake process ensures organizations get the right information every time, reducing follow-up and enabling faster decisions from the start. Security teams eliminate the guesswork and manual back-and-forth that slow approvals to a crawl by using a single, centralized form. Standardization creates a repeatable workflow that’s easy to follow—and even easier to scale. Begin standardizing your vendor intake process with these steps:
- Use one standardized form to capture key risk inputs upfront.
- Ensure all teams submit vendor requests through the same channel.
- Align form fields with the criteria your team uses to assess risk.
Automate triage based on risk level
Manually reviewing every vendor—regardless of risk—takes valuable time. Automated triage uses pre-set rules to instantly sort vendors by risk level, so your team spends time only where it’s truly needed, on high-risk vendors who create the largest risk. This triage approach allows low-risk vendors to move through lighter, faster reviews while high-risk vendors are flagged for deeper scrutiny. The result? Fewer unnecessary delays and a smarter allocation of resources. To begin automating triage based on risk level, consider the following tips:
- Set up automation to classify vendors based on intake responses.
- Route low-risk vendors through fast-track approval paths.
- Trigger additional steps only for vendors with elevated risk.
Take advantage of continuous monitoring tools
Periodic reviews are time-consuming and often outdated by the time a vendor completes them. Continuous monitoring, on the other hand, provides real-time visibility into vendor risk—so organizations don’t need to manually reassess every vendor at regular intervals. By automating post-approval oversight, security teams spend less time rechecking trusted vendors and more time responding to actual changes in a vendor’s security posture. Continuous monitoring shortens the review cycle and improves long-term efficiency. Consider the following steps to implement continuous monitoring in your organization:
- Enable real-time alerts for critical changes in vendor security posture.
- Reduce the need for scheduled re-reviews with continuous visibility.
- Prioritize reviews only when risk levels change meaningfully.
Create approval workflows that fit risk tiers
One-size-fits-all workflows are a leading cause of slow approvals. By designing workflows that match the level of vendor risk, you can dramatically reduce time spent on low-risk vendors while still ensuring high-risk ones are properly vetted. A tier-based approval keeps your approvals moving swiftly—without sacrificing the effort required for more sensitive vendors. To get started creating tier-based approval workflows, utilize the following tips:
- Design short, streamlined workflows for low-risk vendors.
- Set clear SLAs and requirements based on vendor risk tier.
- Define automated escalation paths for complex or high-risk cases.
UpGuard Vendor Risk: Built for speed and security
Slow vendor approvals can create major security risks for organizations—on top of business disruptions, delays, and more headaches. However, automation, security ratings, and standardized processes can easily accelerate vendor approvals. These tools and approaches work together to streamline vendor approvals without sacrificing security.
Investing in effective third-party risk management tools can also help organizations speed up vendor approvals while simultaneously reducing third-party risk. UpGuard Vendor Risk is a comprehensive TPRM platform that delivers continuous vendor insights, 360-degree assessments, and efficient AI-powered workflows. Additional Vendor Risk features include:
- Security ratings: Instantly assess vendor security posture with dynamic, data-driven ratings powered by trusted threat intelligence and non-intrusive analysis.
- Third-party risk monitoring: Gain real-time insights into vendor security, track risks over time, and monitor any vendor instantly with our fully integrated platform.
- AI-powered security profile: Uncover third-party weaknesses in minutes using the combined power of continuous scanning and AI-powered document analysis. Use the time saved to respond earlier and close security gaps before they become incidents.
- Instant risk assessments: Leverage AI to streamline and accelerate your third-party risk assessments and deliver detailed, point-in-time insights at scale.
- Security questionnaires: Streamline the questionnaire process with automation, a comprehensive library, and risk identification tools to eliminate manual effort.
- Reporting and insights: Access tailored reports for different stakeholders in a centralized library, making third-party risk reporting seamless and efficient.
Learn more and get started today at https://www.upguard.com/contact-sales.
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