Crossword Cybersecurity Plc announced that National Nuclear Laboratory (NNL), the government owned but operationally independent UK national laboratory for nuclear fission, is using Rizikon Assurance, Crossword's supplier assurance and third-party risk management platform, to bring new efficiencies to its supplier onboarding and management processes. NNL has been creating a culture change in the way it serves its customers, and engages supply chains to maintain a solid reputation, be agile, reliable, safe and innovative, managing hundreds of supplier contracts across the full nuclear lifecycle. Some of these suppliers are small, but offer highly specialised services to the nuclear sector, whilst others are international organizations on multi-year contracts for construction, maintenance, and decommissioning projects. A typical onboarding process requires a supplier to complete a host of forms about every aspect of its business operations, which can be time consuming to manage for all parties, leading to delays, complications, and poor visibility of risks. As one of the most highly regulated and closely monitored sectors, NNL is constantly working with suppliers to ensure they have the correct processes and insurance in place, as well necessary industry certifications, such asISO 27001 for information security management. Rizikon is a secure, encrypted portal which puts an organisation in control of managing risks in its supply chain and the financial, regulatory, and reputational risks they indirectly carry. Rizikon contains standard questionnaires on subjects such as cyber security, GDPR, supplier on-boarding, modern slavery, and anti-bribery & corruption. Customers can also create their own question sets and scoring approaches, enabling a 360-degree view of supply chain risk in a single pane of glass. NNL is also using the credit checking features of Rizikon, which uses direct integration with Creditsafe to provide an instant status report on a supplier's creditworthiness during the onboarding process from a database of over 320 million companies worldwide. This step is particularly important given the long-term nature of projects in the nuclear industry, where NNL needs to minimise the risks of working with suppliers whose long-term financial future and previous performance needs to be independently verified and can be very time consuming. NNL contracts are banded, with all gold and silver contracted suppliers now onboarded into the Rizikon platform. The holistic nature of the Rizikon platform means that NNL as the contracting authority can demonstrate the risk profile and status of suppliers at any time, and with ease, as well as identify risk issues across an entire contract group.