Audit-Ready, Future-Proof: How One Team Transformed Risk Management at Scale

These days, risk doesn’t live in one place. It’s everywhere: inside and outside your organization, across tools, teams, and vendors. And if your approach to managing it is still siloed, then you’re leaving your organization vulnerable. The growing dependence on third parties only multiplies risk exposure, especially without a consistent framework for evaluation. In this strategy article, we’ll dive into why. 

Many teams are still struggling to juggle manual, document-heavy processes, which hinder their ability to keep up with shifting regulations, slow audit preparation, and make it easy for things to slip through the cracks. Incomplete or out-of-date data only worsens the issue, leaving you to make decisions reactively. What organizations need is centralized, real-time visibility into their risk posture along with a consistent way to evaluate third-party risk. Here’s where ServiceNow comes in. 

A leading provider of human capital and business solutions (which was already an existing ServiceNow customer) was looking to evolve how it managed risk, both internally and across its extended network of vendors. With shifting regulations and increasing third-party exposure, the company needed a more unified and proactive approach. 

CoreX was brought in to support two related initiatives. First, strengthening enterprise risk practices through ServiceNow IRM. Then, expanding those capabilities with a dedicated implementation of ServiceNow’s Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) solution. This case study explores both implementations.  

Integrated Risk Management (IRM) 

CoreX guided an implementation of ServiceNow IRM, including Policy and Compliance, Policy Exceptions, and the establishment of a Unified Compliance Framework  (UCF) integration. The goal? To move the organization away from scattered, manually tracked controls toward a model that’s standardized, scalable, and actually built to keep up with the pace of change.  

When we stepped in, the organization already had a set of control objectives in place and a semi-automated way of generating evidence. But the controls were manually defined and inconsistently tracked, which led to inefficiencies and validation gaps. Mapping these existing controls to UCF-defined objectives wasn’t simple either. It took a few working sessions to get it right, mostly because of:

• Inconsistent entity definitions  
• A lack of uniform data structures 
• The need to reconcile manually defined controls with UCF standards 

CoreX worked closely with the company’s compliance team to configure a setup that gave them more control over how evidence was reviewed and validated. Before, evidence submissions were automatically affecting indicator scores, even when they hadn’t been properly vetted. The new configuration: 

• Enabled compliance reviewers to validate submissions before they impacted indicator scores.
• Ensured submitted evidence met internal standards before acceptance or rejection.
• Included an optimization that allowed validated evidence to carry over to related control objectives automatically, reducing redundant effort.  

CoreX also helped the organization formalize how policy exceptions were handled, turning what had been a loose, informal process into a clear framework for managing deviations from standard controls. By the project’s end, the company had a centralized way to track risk, consistent workflows across teams, and a compliance system built to grow and adapt as regulations continue to evolve.

Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM)  

Following the IRM rollout, CoreX helped configure TPRM (which, at the time, was still called Risk Management) with vendor segmentation, risk tiering, and inherent/residual risk scoring. During that period, the company’s vendor risk process was manual, slow, and unreliable. 

Key challenges included:

• Assessments sent via Excel files over email 
• No way to track progress or vendor responses 
• Long delays waiting for evidence submissions 
• No automation to trigger follow-ups or reminders 

The implementation helped them get smarter about how they assessed vendor risk. Instead of sending out the same questionnaire to everyone, they could tailor assessments based on what a vendor did and what they'd committed to in their SLAs. That way, they were asking the right questions, tied to the real level of risk.

The solution also integrated with BitSight to keep vendor risk scores up to date using external risk signals. If a vendor’s score suddenly spiked (for example, from low to high risk), the system automatically triggered a reassessment. 

To keep things moving, CoreX built a custom flow to track assessment progress and send automated reminders to vendors, reducing manual follow-up and helping the team complete risk reviews on time. 

Creating a Scalable Foundation

On the compliance side, the integration with UCF made a big difference. It gave the team the ability to quickly assess standing against any given framework, confidently respond to customer requests, and evaluate whether adopting new standards was feasible. 

What once required weeks of documentation review could now be scoped and communicated in a matter of days. In an industry where winning or losing business often hinges on demonstrating compliance, this agility was a significant strategic advantage. 

For third-party risk, the shift to automated assessments and real-time vendor risk scoring was a game-changer.  It gave their small team the visibility they needed to manage risk way more effectively and with a lot less guesswork. Most of the follow-up is now automated, so they’re not constantly chasing responses. And because assessments are tailored to what each vendor actually does, the whole process feels more relevant, focused, and manageable. 

Behind the scenes, IRM and TPRM were part of a much bigger transformation. The company had accumulated more than a decade of technical debt, and the CoreX team led a full reimplementation (touching nearly every ServiceNow module) in just a year and a half. This all took place during a particularly complex period; the organization had recently acquired another company, and the two had separate, highly customized ServiceNow instances. 

CoreX not only led the integration effort, migrating and streamlining critical systems across both entities, but also later supported the separation when the companies divested. Both organizations remained CoreX clients, a testament to the strength of the partnership and the solutions delivered.  

As the project lead stated, “The vision can be accomplished when you have the right team, the right time, and the right momentum. When you’re thinking strategically about defining the plan, its execution will bring actual value to the organization.”