When Forms Become The Test: A Veteran's Perspective

The army runs on paperwork. Leave passes, travel claims, vehicle logs, signatures on everything. Seven years in the Canadian Army taught me that if the form isn’t right, the thing doesn’t happen.

That habit is a big part of what veteran-owned suppliers bring to a supply chain. We’re used to working inside someone else’s rules, and we expect to show our work. So it bothers me how much diverse spend disappears before a contract is ever signed, and how rarely anyone notices.

Jumping Through Hoops

Caseway was certified by IWSCC in September. Since then I’ve registered us with a handful of large buyers. One wanted us set up in two separate supplier portals, and a couple of others went quiet for weeks. I run a company that automates forms, and it still wasn’t quick.

Picture the onboarding kit from the supplier’s side. There’s:

Certificates of Insurance
WSIB
WorksafeBC Clearance
Health & Safety Programs
Codes of Conduct
Privacy Questionnaires
..and more!

More and more often there’s a cybersecurity questionnaire too, and those can run to hundreds of questions.

A large incumbent hands it to the compliance department. At a five-person Veteran-owned firm, the compliance department is the owner, at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, somewhere between chasing invoices and doing the actual work.

Most suppliers push through it anyway. The ones who give up rarely say why. They go quiet, and the buyer’s diverse spend number stays exactly where it was.

Less Tests, More Success.

I’d bet most supplier diversity teams know their diverse spend to the dollar. Ask how many certified suppliers opened the onboarding kit and never finished it, and I suspect the answer is a guess.

Supplier diversity teams can fix most of this without lowering a single standard. Here’s where I’d start.

Count the Dropouts. Track where diverse suppliers stall: the form they stopped on, and how many days had passed since the invitation. No serious online store runs a checkout without knowing where people abandon their carts, and a supplier portal is a checkout with the supplier as the customer.
Accept the Certificate. IWSCC certification already verifies who owns the business. A second form asking the supplier to prove it again adds time and nothing else.
Stop Asking Suppliers to Retype What They’ve Already Uploaded. Too many portals want the insurance certificate as a PDF and then want the carrier, policy number, limits and expiry date typed into separate boxes. The buyer needs those fields, because that’s how expiry dates get tracked, but the supplier shouldn’t be the one typing them. Every retyped field is one more chance for a typo that bounces the registration back two weeks later.

“Software reads certificates well now. This is the unglamorous end of AI, and it’s where I’d put money first if I ran procurement at a big company: let it fill the fields from what the supplier already sent, and have a person check the result.”

Stage the Kit. A supplier up for a small first engagement shouldn’t have to clear the same paperwork as a ten-year master agreement. Someone who’ll never touch your network or your customers’ data doesn’t need the full cyber questionnaire on day one. Ask for what this stage needs and save the rest for when there’s a contract to protect.
Say Why You’re Asking. Army orders carry the commander’s intent, so a soldier knows what the mission is for and can still get it done when the plan falls apart. Onboarding kits almost never explain themselves. A supplier who understood what your privacy questionnaire is meant to protect would get it right the first time far more often.
Tell People What Happens After They Hit Submit. An automated “your registration is under review,” followed by six weeks of nothing, is usually where good suppliers decide it isn’t worth it. A named contact and a rough timeline cost almost nothing.

A word to fellow Veteran owners, too: build your application kit once and keep it current: