In our last article, I wrote about the importance of understanding what you are actually buying before asking a supplier for a better price.
There is another question that matters just as much.
Are you still buying it from the right supplier?
Most businesses have some form of supplier approval process. A questionnaire gets completed, insurance documents are provided, certifications are checked, terms are agreed and the supplier is added to the system.
At that point they are approved.
But approval only tells you that a supplier met your requirements at a particular point in time. It does not tell you whether that remains true a year or two later.
We have recently completed a Supplier Assurance Discovery for a multi-company group, looking at how suppliers are selected, assessed, approved and managed across the business. It would have been easy to focus purely on onboarding, but the more interesting question quickly became what happens after that point.
A supplier may have been perfectly suitable when they were first approved, but that does not mean the picture will look the same two years later. Their financial position may have weakened, capacity could be tighter, ownership may have changed or performance may simply have drifted. At the same time, your own business may have grown, taken on different customers or become more dependent on what that supplier provides.
None of those changes automatically make the supplier a problem, but together they can alter the level of risk considerably.
And this is where one of those simple phrases applies.
Nothing is a problem, until it is a problem.
When it does become a problem, every man and his dog suddenly wants to know what happened, why it happened, who knew about it and whether anything could have been done sooner.
That is why supplier assurance matters.
Supplier assurance is about more than compliance
It is easy to think of supplier assurance as a compliance exercise.
Insurance, health and safety, certifications, financial checks, modern slavery, data protection and other requirements all have their place, depending on the supplier and the nature of the relationship.
But a supplier can have all the right documents and still not be the right supplier for your business.
They may be regularly late, quality may have slipped or their costs may no longer be competitive. Perhaps they no longer have the capacity to support your growth, or you have become too dependent on them without really noticing.
There may also be risks sitting underneath the relationship that are harder to see. They could depend heavily on one person, one site or one critical subcontractor. Any of those things could become important very quickly if something went wrong.
So, for me, supplier assurance needs to go beyond asking whether a supplier is compliant.
The bigger question is whether they remain capable, appropriate and resilient enough to support what your business now needs from them.
This is where supply chain resilience starts
Supply chain resilience often gets discussed after something has already happened.
A supplier fails. A delivery is missed. A critical component suddenly becomes unavailable.
Then the questions start.
Who else can supply it? Do we have another approved source? How much stock do we have? How quickly could we move the work? When did we last review the supplier?
By that point, of course, you are reacting.
Real resilience starts earlier than that.
Current UK guidance on supply chain resilience makes a similar point, focusing on understanding key suppliers, identifying vulnerabilities and reviewing risk as circumstances change.
It starts with understanding which suppliers genuinely matter to the business and where the consequences would be greatest if they could no longer supply you.
That does not mean treating every supplier in the same way. A low-value office supplier clearly does not represent the same level of risk as a sole-source manufacturer, specialist subcontractor or critical service provider.
The point is not to build a huge process around everybody.
It is to know where the risk sits and focus attention accordingly.
Performance has to be part of the picture
There is another reason supplier assurance should not stop at onboarding.
Once a supplier starts working with you, you finally get the most useful information of all. You get to see how they actually perform.
Are they delivering when they say they will? Is quality where it needs to be? Are issues resolved quickly? Are costs still competitive? Can they support where the business is heading?
The interesting thing is that different parts of the business often have very different views of the same supplier.
Operations may think they are poor. Purchasing may think they are fine. Finance can see costs increasing. The supplier may think there is no issue because nobody has ever formally told them otherwise.
Without a shared view of supplier performance, the conversation becomes based on perception rather than fact.
That makes it much harder to decide whether a supplier needs support, improvement or, in some cases, replacement.
This is increasingly part of the procurement and supply chain advisory work we do with growing SMEs, where supplier performance, risk and commercial visibility need to be looked at together.
Growth changes what good looks like
This is particularly relevant for growing SMEs.
A supplier process that worked perfectly well when the business was smaller may no longer be enough as the organisation develops. You may have added sites, won larger customers, taken on bigger contracts or started operating in more demanding sectors.
Your dependence on suppliers may also have increased without the process around them changing at the same pace.
That does not mean the old approach was wrong.
It simply means the business has moved on.
Supplier assurance needs to move with it.
Visibility is what makes this manageable
For me, this ultimately comes back to visibility.
If somebody asked you today which suppliers are genuinely critical to your business, could you answer confidently?
Could you identify which ones have not been reviewed recently, where performance is deteriorating or where you have single-source dependency?
What about insurance or certifications that are about to expire, or suppliers where there are unresolved issues?
The information may already exist, but if it is spread across spreadsheets, ERP systems, SharePoint folders, questionnaires, inboxes and people’s heads, it is difficult to manage proactively.
And this is where supplier assurance and resilience really come together.
It is another example of why businesses need to be able to see the whole picture across their supplier base. You cannot effectively manage risks you cannot see.
Are they still the right supplier?
Choosing the right supplier matters, but the real challenge is making sure they remain the right supplier.
The supplier you approved three years ago may still be absolutely the right partner for your business.
But you should know why.
Supplier assurance is not simply about having the right documents on file. It is about having confidence that the suppliers your business depends on remain capable, compliant, commercially appropriate and able to support you when it matters.
That confidence should come from visibility, not assumption.
Supply chain resilience does not start when a supplier fails.
It starts much earlier than that.
How Confident Are You in Your Supplier Base?
Our Supplier Assurance Discovery gives businesses a clear starting point for understanding how suppliers are selected, approved, monitored and reviewed.
We look at how things work today, where the biggest gaps or risks may sit and what a practical future approach could look like for your business.
The aim is not to create unnecessary process.
It is to help you understand whether the suppliers you rely on are still the right suppliers for the business.
If you would like to explore what a Supplier Assurance Discovery could uncover in your business, get in touch with Alliance Procurement Solutions.