Managing risk and compliance and assuring a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR) is hard enough internally. As global corporations extend their partner network, professionals in these functions struggle to define and enforce requirements outside the walls of their organization. Leading companies establish teams to assure a greater level of responsibility among their business partners —most notably in the supply chain. Forrester studied and interviewed companies with successful programs, the best of which maintain a closed-loop process, use stakeholders as a collective early warning system, and extend resources for ongoing improvement.