Guidance
Supply chain security guidance
Proposing a series of 12 principles, designed to help you establish effective control and oversight of your supply chain.
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IV. Continuous improvement
As your supply chain evolves, you'll need to continue improving and maintaining security.
11. Encourage the continuous improvement of security within your supply chain
- Encourage your suppliers to continue improving their security arrangements, emphasising how this might enable them to compete for and win future contracts with you. This will also help you to grow your supply chain and choice of potential suppliers.
- Advise and support your suppliers as they seek to make these improvements.
- Avoid creating unnecessary barriers to such improvements: acknowledge and be prepared to recognise any existing security practices or certifications they might have that could demonstrate how they meet your minimum security requirements.
- Allow time for your suppliers to achieve security improvements, but require them to provide you with timescales and plans that demonstrate how they intend to achieve them.
- Listen to and act on any concerns highlighted through performance monitoring, incidents, or upward reporting from suppliers that may suggest that current approaches are not working as effectively as planned.
12. Build trust with suppliers
- Seek to build strategic partnerships with key suppliers, sharing issues with them, encouraging and valuing their input. Gain their buy-in to your approach to supply chain security, so that it takes account of their needs as well as your own.
- Let them manage sub-contractors for you, but require them to provide you with appropriate reporting to confirm the status of these relationships.
- Maintain continuous and effective communications with your suppliers.
- Look at supply chain management as a shared issue.
