Introducing our new Material Suppliers membership scheme

Whenever a buyer works with a supplier of any kind, they need to know that they can trust them to carry out high-quality work, remain financially stable and operate ethically. With the launch of our new Material Supplier memberships, it’s now easier than ever for buyers to find checked and verified material suppliers of required goods like the lumber products.

Although our standard subcontractor memberships have been helping construction companies to prove their credentials for many years, as some of the categories don’t apply to the work that material suppliers do, these memberships don’t showcase the capabilities of those suppliers as well as they could.

We know that buyers need just as much reassurance that their material suppliers have appropriate insurance, strong financials and ethical policies and processes as they do for any other part of their supply chain. So we set out to create a scheme designed to help material suppliers prove their credentials, and buyers to source the materials they need with confidence.

Designed by the industry, for the industry

We started by establishing an internal steering group, which worked closely with key industry stakeholders (including Balfour Beatty, Bam, Kier and Volker) to develop a scheme that would provide buyers and material suppliers with all the support they need. They reviewed our existing supplier question set and identified where additions and amends were needed to make it more applicable to material suppliers and remove any insight gaps for buyers. Based on their recommendations, we have launched two new Material Supplier schemes: Constructionline Materials Plus and Constructionline Materials Premier.

Both schemes provide plenty of useful features for material suppliers – both Plus and Premier give members a searchable profile, for example, and access to our opportunity matching service and Meet the Buyer events.

The Constructionline Materials Plus scheme is suitable for all materials suppliers, particularly small to medium-sized businesses that require an easy-to-use process. As well as requiring suppliers to provide their general business information, including financial accounts and insurances, it offers the opportunity to showcase CSR commitments, ethical sourcing credentials and health and safety policies and processes. With sustainable best practice also now high on a buyer’s agenda, Constructionline Materials Plus also allows suppliers to demonstrate their environmental commitments, including transport and haulage emissions standards and compliance with ISO 14001.

Constructionline Materials Premier is designed for larger materials suppliers and includes all the same requirements as Plus, as well as the inclusion of a wider range of verification modules. This enables suppliers to demonstrate further credentials in areas such as delivery performance, equal opportunity and diversity and quality management. It also allows organisations to demonstrate additional environmental commitments, by detailing their carbon footprint, and measures being taken to reduce emissions through renewable sourcing and reducing waste.

Benefits for buyers and suppliers alike

By introducing our new Material Supplier schemes, we are striving to help both buyers and suppliers to work better together.

Suppliers will benefit from a question set that is designed to help them showcase their capabilities and stand out from their competitors. By becoming Constructionline verified, they can enhance their credibility and boost their organisation’s visibility to buyers, which can significantly increase their chances of finding and winning new work. With our new opportunity matching feature, material suppliers will also receive proactive notifications about projects that suit their capabilities, which means that they should never miss a suitable opportunity.

Constructionline Buyers will also benefit from the new schemes, as they will now be able to access relevant, complete and up to date insight into key risk areas for both subcontractors and material suppliers. All of the data is easily available to them within the Constructionline platform, and they can set tailored compliance parameters for different types of material, so they can simply search and source the right suppliers for their specific requirements. With this level of data at their fingertips, buyers can reduce their legal, financial and reputational risk by identifying material suppliers that meet their standards and maintaining control and visibility of their full supply chain throughout a project.

Join us in raising industry standards

We believe that our new Material Suppliers membership scheme is an important step towards ensuring consistently high standards across the construction industry and we’ve already verified our first material supplier – Fullmen Limited – to Material Supplier Plus level. 

Whether you’re a material supplier or a buyer that would like to verify its full supply chain, check out our Membership page to find out more about our dedicated Material Supplier schemes. If you have any questions, our friendly team is always on hand to help – just contact us via Live Chat by logging into your account or call us on 0333 300 3066.