From Frustration to Efficiency: How Diligent Pharma Transforms Vendor Qualification

The traditional Vendor qualification model is broken. Sponsors face an inefficient, time-consuming, and costly process due to the lack of centralization. On average, qualifying a Vendor can cost Sponsors up to $20,000 and can take more than 100 days to complete, creating significant delays and resource strain.

As we engaged with Sponsors across the industry, a recurring set of challenges emerged in the Vendor qualification process. The traditional approach—reliant on isolated, repetitive evaluations—has been (and always will be) a source of frustration and inefficiency. Here’s what we’ve learned from these conversations and how these pain points directly slow progress.

1. Redundancy & Wasted Effort
Each Sponsor must individually qualify each Vendor. This means that every Sponsor conducts its own evaluations, risk assessments, and audits, leading to significant redundancy and wasted effort. Sponsors start from scratch, repeating the exact qualification process others have already completed.

2. Increased Costs & Delays
This approach is inherently inefficient, as nearly identical tasks are repeated for the same Vendors across different Sponsors. This prolongs the process, drives up costs, and slows down contract finalization. Sponsors spend valuable time collecting and evaluating the same data, hindering their ability to move forward with key initiatives.

3. Inconsistent Evaluations
Another issue is that auditors are frequently underqualified or insufficiently trained, and their skills may not align with the outsourced activities they are tasked with evaluating.
An independent qualification should yield the same results each time, but Vendors are often forced to address different findings that arise based on the whim of an auditor. This simply wastes the Vendor’s time in addressing findings that in reality aren’t an indicator of actual performance.

The traditional model of Vendor qualification is riddled with inefficiencies, duplication, and inconsistencies, all of which increase costs and contribute to unpredictable timelines. Diligent provides a transformative solution to the inefficiencies of traditional Vendor qualification. By leveraging a centralized database, Diligent standardizes and streamlines the entire qualification process, eliminating redundancies and significantly reducing time to contract. Here’s how Diligent’s model outperforms conventional approaches:

1. Centralization & Standardization
Diligent simplifies Vendor qualification by centralizing completed, searchable Vendor RFI questionnaires and qualification audit reports on a single platform. Sponsors no longer need to perform individual, repetitive evaluations and audits for each Vendor. Instead, they gain access to standardized information that speeds up decision-making and ensures a more consistent qualification process.

2. Efficiency & Collaboration
The Diligent model fosters an efficient and collaborative environment between Sponsors and Vendors. By utilizing a shared platform, Sponsors save significant time, while Vendors benefit from a single, streamlined qualification process that serves multiple Sponsors. This symbiotic relationship eliminates the need for duplicate qualifications, reducing the administrative burden for all parties involved.

3. Proactive Risk Management & ROI
Diligent’s approach goes beyond mere efficiency by offering proactive risk management and delivering measurable ROI. The centralized platform ensures up-to-date Vendor information is readily available, allowing Sponsors to make faster, better-informed decisions. This proactive stance mitigates risks, improves overall quality control, and delivers cost savings through a quicker, more predictable onboarding process.

The Challenge: Cerevel struggled with a substantial Vendor qualification backlog, which led to increased time and cost burdens. Additionally, inconsistencies in the approach and expertise of third-party auditors made it difficult to accurately identify qualification risks, further complicating the process.

The Solution: Cerevel adopted Diligent’s subscription service to streamline Vendor qualification activities. This included access to pre-qualified Vendors through RFIs and audit reports. Diligent also conducted qualifications for new Vendors of interest. Cerevel utilized Diligent’s RFI comparison tool to evaluate provider risks and applied RFI Risk Scoring to assess Vendor risk profiles. Participation in pre-scheduled audits provided further support.

The Impact: By leveraging Diligent’s system, Cerevel freed up internal audit resources to focus on higher-priority activities while gaining greater flexibility in scheduling. Audit costs were reduced by 64% compared to industry averages, and qualification timelines were dramatically shortened from over 90 days to just 2–3 days per Vendor. Additionally, Cerevel enhanced its regulatory compliance and risk management processes, using Diligent’s approach for both requalification and new Vendor qualifications.

Diligent’s model reduces the qualification timeline by an average of 100 days, as RFIs, audits, and reviews are consolidated into a streamlined, comprehensive process. This accelerates Vendor onboarding and can save over 64% per audit, significantly reducing both time and costs associated with Vendor qualification.

Ready to save valuable time and money? Explore the Diligent Qualified Library—new Vendor audit reports and RFIs are added to our library every week.