How to Avoid Commonly Made Supply Chain Mistakes

Over 80% of all global trade passes through a supply chain.

If your business is the body, your supply chains are your blood vessels, pumping essential resources around your company. Without a properly functioning supply chain, your business can falter and collapse. Just as we must protect our health and well-being to live long and happy lives, we must also protect our supply chains to survive and thrive in a commercial environment.

Supply chain problems can present an enormous risk, but many of the pitfalls of supply chains are completely avoidable. The expert team at Veriforce CHAS has compiled this short, practical guide to avoiding common supply chain issues and mistakes.

Avoiding Common Mistakes In Your Supply Chain: It’s All About Certification 

Can certification really be your one-way ticket to avoid problems within your supply chain? As with anything in life, there is no single “magic bullet” that will protect you against any mistakes. However, where your supply chain is concerned, certification is a powerful tool that can eliminate many common issues poised to drag your business down.

This idea leads us to an important question:

How exactly does certification come into play when mitigating the potential for mistakes in building and maintaining a reliable supply chain?

Creating A Flexible Supply Chain

At Veriforce CHAS, we’ve previously reported on new and ever-progressing developments that have seen supply chain environments face stricter standards and regulations; this involves everything from health and safety to sustainable practices and avoidance of modern slavery.

Failure to comply with supply chain standards and regulations can result in anything from black marks on your reputation to legal action against your business. It’s not necessarily difficult to find verified contractors and suppliers that allow you to conform to rising standards and regulations. Instead, it can be a nightmare to adapt your supply chain because your current contractors cannot meet new criteria.

Certification is a simple way of future-proofing your organisation against increasingly stricter standards. Contractors that have demonstrated their dedication to conforming to the requirements that form such certification demonstrate their willingness to adapt, which means in the event of changes to regulations, they’ll likely step up to meet them.

But they may not even have to.

Contractor certifications, such as those awarded by Veriforce CHAS, regularly exceed standards and regulations imposed by supply chain regulators. Even with standards rising, those with appropriate certification are already prepared to meet them. By assuring your suppliers have the necessary certifications, you ensure flexibility in your supply chain and can easily maintain your current supply chain even as the rules that govern them become ever more intricate.

Certification for suppliers

If you’re a supplier, you can get verified with Veriforce CHAS to prequalify for UK contracts. This allows you to showcase your credentials and certifications to potential buyers, making prequalifying contracts across the UK easier and faster.

Become a verified supplier

Preventing Supplier Procurement Slowdowns

From start to finish, supplier procurement can be an exhaustive and time-consuming task. Any step to reduce the onboarding process can have profound benefits.

The cost savings of efficient procurement are no joke.

One of the most common mistakes in supply chain procurement is allowing onboarding to exceed the necessary time allocation, with additional resources spent on ensuring contractors are reliable, effective, and trustworthy providers. Certification  streamlines the onboarding process, cuts procurement time down, and guarantees you acquire the best possible contractors.

How?

Certified contractors demonstrate their ability to provide value to your business. You require no additional research time or quality checks, which enables more rapid decision-making. The certification assures you of high standards, so you don’t have to assess them using your own resources.

Not only does this save time on checks, but it also allows you to move forward with operations faster, preventing any unnecessary downtime that could be connected with the protracted procurement of contractors.

Protecting Against Illegal Supplier Activity

There are potentially severe implications of being involved with a supplier that is in breach of the law.

Being Ignorant Of Illegal Activity 

Any illegal activity in your supply chain — even if you’re completely ignorant to it — can implicate your business in the activity. Association with businesses conducting modern slavery practices, for example, can lead to action against your own business for supporting and working with that contractor. This is particularly pertinent if you’ve made statements under the Modern Slavery Act (MSA) 2015 claiming that your business is not involved in any activities of modern slavery. This is more common than you might think. 

Many suppliers will claim to be free of modern slavery when they aren’t, with businesses failing to perform their due diligence to make sure these assertions are genuine and accurate. Plenty of other forms of corruption in your supply chain can legally implicate you as well, such as bribery, connections to trafficking, fraud and so on.

Updates to the MSA in 2025

In 2025, the UK Home Office released revised statutory guidance under Section 54 of the Modern Slavery Act 2015, raising expectations of what businesses must include in their transparency statements. This includes: 

• Detailed due diligence
• Disclosure of incidents
• Structured training programmes
• Continuous monitoring and KPIs
• Evidence of year‑on‑year improvement.

Certification, provided by robust frameworks, can make it easier for businesses to deliver rich transparency statements and adapt quickly as guidance and procurement expectations evolve. Ultimately, this keeps you compliant, legal and eradicates any major unforeseen supply chain problems.

If a contractor within your supply chain is implicated in illegal activity, they may be forced to close. If that happens, your supply chain link is broken and your supply of resources is lost. The knock-on impact of this loss can be devastating. Immediate loss of essential resources can, at their worst, cause complete and total disruption to your business output. For large businesses, the cost implications here can be difficult to comprehend.

Many businesses are not paying close enough attention to their supply chains and how their contractors are regulated. Failure to do so can be costly, taxing and hugely disruptive.  Working only with suppliers with appropriate certification removes this potentially catastrophic problem.

Find certified suppliers

The Scarcity Of New Materials Is Intensifying

Since 2022, many suppliers have been battling with raw material shortages more than ever. This has forced supply chains to react quickly, operate differently and manage risk more carefully. 

In the UK, geopolitical disruptions have made supply chains particularly vulnerable to significant delays in the supply of raw materials essential to decarbonisation and advanced technologies. Materials critical in electrical equipment have also experienced huge delays of almost double and triple normal lead times. Almost 61% of respondents in the 2023 Hubs Supply Chain Resilience report said that raw material shortages were the single biggest cause of supply chain issues in 2023.

So, what can you do? 

Focus on what you can control. Diversify suppliers, aim for crystal clear communication with internal and external stakeholders, and manage expectations from the start. You can also utilise the latest business technologies, such as ERP systems to monitor and maintain supply levels. 

Raw material shortages may be out of your control, but fantastic communication will be your saviour. 

No Longer Fostering Unnecessary Supply Chain Risk

Expect for the best; plan for the worst. It’s an important motto to live by when considering your supply chain.

The larger and more complicated your supply chain web, the greater the potential for problems. These risks can be mitigated and even eradicated with proper planning and consideration. But a common mistake amongst businesses managing complex supply chains is a failure to effectively evaluate and address their risk profile.

You never know when suppliers might fail to deliver — any number of problems could befall them, from the inability to obtain resources themselves to inadequate internal procedures. You can follow certain practices to avoid supply chain issues, like diversifying your supplier base and making sure you have backup contractors available. One way certification can help is to offer reassurances that risk factors are well handled.

Risk management certification, such as the Veriforce CHAS Common Assessment Standard, is presented to suppliers that have demonstrated their ability to manage and mitigate risk. It’s evidence that these contractors are prepared to meet challenges and maintain operations in the face of adversity. With risk appropriately managed, you have greater peace of mind that your supply chain structure can weather unforeseen problems.

Honourable Mention: Cut Out Duplication In Your Supply Chain

Certification is a powerful tool for avoiding supply chain mistakes, but as we mentioned, it’s not a magic bullet. You can implement measures to prevent problems arising from other mistakes within your supply chain.

Cutting out duplication is one such example.

Duplication within the supply chain often happens when two similar elements of the supply chain are merged. The result is that you may double-up on workflow processes, suppliers or supply chain facilities. Do this and you’ll be using more resources than you need, but that’s not all.

When it comes to problems within your supply chain, it can be much harder to work out where said problem originates from if multiple sources could potentially be the culprit. You can end up playing spot the difference, sometimes with very intricate and complex procedures.

What you want is a lean supply chain, one that is efficient and optimised to remove duplication. The best way to secure a lean supply chain is through audits and analysis. Take a fine-toothed comb to your supply chains and look for areas where you are duplicating processes unnecessarily.

Note that duplication is not the same as redundancy.

Redundancies are often built into the supply chains, just as they are in other complex systems like aeroplanes, to ensure that if one element fails, the entire system doesn’t crash. Intentional duplications, such as multiple available suppliers for essential resources, is not the same as unintentional and wasteful duplication. This occurs as a byproduct of improper supply chain management, which is why it needs to go.

Lean supply chains are about ironing out kinks, not removing necessary redundancy safeguards.

Key Takeaways

• Certification is critical to mitigating risk by ensuring suppliers meet high standards and adapt to constantly evolving regulations.
• Updated UK laws (e.g. Modern Slavery Act 2025 guidance) demands stronger due diligence and transparent reporting.
• Raw material shortages caused by geopolitical disruption creates major delays, especially in the tech and construction sectors.
• Streamlined procurement is possible with certified contractors, cutting onboarding time and resource costs.
• Illegal supplier activity that you’re unaware of (e.g. modern slavery, fraud) can implicate your business – working with certification can avoid catastrophic penalties.
• Remove wasteful duplication: Build lean, resilient supply chains with smart audits and backup suppliers.

Certification seriously helps mitigate the risk of mistakes with supply chains. If you’re a contractor looking to secure the confidence of big clients, Veriforce CHAS can help you secure the certification you need. If you’re a big business looking to find certified suppliers you can rely on, we’ve got a roster of prequalified contractors that can help you eliminate risk factors.