Following a comprehensive and systematic review of how your organisation operates, we provide you with recommendations to help your organisation improve procurement processes, policies and procedures. These focus on helping your organisation become more competitive and operate best in class professional purchasing and supply practices.

Achieving CIPS Certification involves a ten-step process and normally takes between three and nine months to complete depending on the individual needs of your organisation as identified during our initial review. CIPS Certification is valid for three years during which there will be an 18 month review.

• Demonstrates your organisation’s sound procurement policies, processes and procedures as verified and monitored by an independent body
• Creates opportunities for continuous improvement, identified through regular performance audits
• Ensures your organisation is able to deliver value for money
• Highlights opportunities for creating efficiencies and better ways of working
• Increases reputation and credibility within the marketplace with suppliers, stakeholders and competitors
• Creates a positive effect on staff and their morale, they know that they are working within and to a professional standard
• Demonstrates a robust ethical position

Exceptional organisations achieve CIPS Certification Gold. It is the highest standard of excellence for the purchasing and supply chain function. The programme rigorously assesses purchasing and supply management as a significant contributor to your organisation’s competitive advantage, effectiveness and efficiency.

Organisations are not able to achieve Certification Gold until they have achieved our standard level Certification; however the Gold programme can be started in conjunction with Certification.

CIPS Certification Gold features & benefits

• Demonstrates a robust ethical procurement process
• Robust audit of your application for certification
• One-to-one interviews with key internal stakeholders from within your organisation
• One-to-one interviews with key suppliers and their respective procurement managers
• Detailed assessment of strategic dimensions including supply relationship management, delivering successful projects, leadership, continuity planning, knowledge management and corporate social responsibility
• Provides an accurate insight into procurement performance in support of corporate strategic intent (CSI)
• Confirms your organisation has the people, process, infrastructure, tools and metrics, capabilities and capacity dimensions to deliver CSI
• Establishes independent benchmarking using the capabilities of other leading organisations
• Provides specific feedback from the stakeholder community to support continuous improvement
• Drives projects forward through a commitment to continuous improvement
• Promotes an enhanced reputation and increased credibility for your organisation across the global procurement sector
• Provides support for the on-going challenge of maintaining 'best practice'

• ASDA (Wal*Mart)
• Computer Sciences Corporation (Northern Region)
• BBC
• Honeywell (Novar)
• Essex County Council
• QinetiQ
• Buying Team
• Zurich Financial Services
• PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP
• National Air Traffic Services (NATS)
• DEFRA
• Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation
• Communisis

There are also more than 100 public and private sector organisations that have achieved CIPS Certification.

Certification customer testimonials

Over 100 organisations across all sectors and in countries around the world have benefited from CIPS Certification. 

Here are just a few comments from organisations who have completed CIPS Certification.

Please see our detailed case studies for further information.

Achieving business objectives

“(Certification) ensures we are adopting all of the correct policies, procedures and processes to maximise every opportunity with our suppliers and therefore we are offering the best to our customers.”  – Shirley Cooper, Procurement and Returns Director, Computacenter

“As with all councils, Bedfordshire has a stretching agenda for savings through professional procurement.  (Achieving Certification) gives us confidence that we have a firm foundation on which to work towards those opportunities.” – Terri Carr, Strategic Procurement Advisor, Bedfordshire County Council

“One of our key targets is to reduce external expenditure by £300 million and this will be largely achieved through company-wide compliance to our procurement processes.  I am pleased these processes have been given recognition with CIPS Certification.” – John Rishton, Chief Financial Officer, British Airways

“Success in achieving CIPS Certification standard of excellence in purchasing policies and procedures will help the procurement and logistics division of UNRWA to maximise value for money when purchasing goods, services and construction contracts for vital relief work” – Fredrik Schultz, Chief of the Procurement and Logistics Division, United Nations Relief And Works Agency For Palestine Refugees In The Near East (UNRWA)

Staying competitive

“Gaining CIPS certification will demonstrate that Accenture Procurement BPO Services delivers high performance procurement in managing our own internal spend as well as for clients.”  Karl Pick, Global Procurement Director, Accenture

“CIPS Certification will drive continued improvement.  We want to operate on a world-class platform and this will ensure we are able to do that.” – Sandra Brown, Group Operations Director, Tetley Group (part of Tata Tea and the Tata Group)

"CIPS Certification testifies to our capability to deliver great value."  Iqbal Khoory, Senior Vice President - Procurement, DP World 

“Potential clients are including more questions about procurement performance in the tendering process.  The bigger the client organisation, the more importance they attach to our procurement processes.” – Graham Anderson, Procurement Director, Dalkia plc

Achieving credibility

“The only real test of our success is by benchmarking against industry best practice – and who better to independently undertake this than CIPS” – Derek Faulkner, Vice President Global Procurement EMEA, American Express Services Europe

“Certification provides real recognition of the professionalism of the Vodafone supply chain management team and is a seal of approval from our industry” – Kendall Smith, Head of Supply Chain, Vodafone

“We can be confident that council purchasing procedures had now been benchmarked successfully against recognised best practice” – Andy Davies, Head of Procurement, Surrey County Council

“We are delighted to receive CIPS Certification.  It will demonstrate to our customers that HP can provide high-quality, competitive third-party solutions to complement our core HP products and services.” – Bill Lascelles, UK & Ireland Resource Planning and Sourcing Manager, Hewlett Packard

“We think we are good, but the only way of knowing is to be scrutinised and benchmarked externally against the best.  The suppliers we deal with and our clients need to know that we are robust in terms of our systems, processes, policies and people management.” – Guy Strafford, Client Services Director, buyingTeam 

Gaining recognition

“One of the reasons we went for CIPS Certification is to enable us to say “look how good we are at what we do.”  Certification is a great story for us and good for our salespeople to tell their customers.  It’s very exciting.” – Emma Richardson, Procurement Manager, Microsoft UK

“We have long operated with a set of robust policies and procedures, but this award gives the external recognition our policy people deserve and we will use it to best effect in our internal marketing.” – Meryl Bushel, Chief Procurement Officer, BT

“This (achieving CIPS Certification) is a significant step towards greater transparency and accountability in the management of radioactive waste in the UK.” – Chris Murray, Managing Director, Nirex

“(Certification) allows our procurement function to have a greater influence throughout the business to boost bottom-line profitability.” – Paul Spanswick, Chief Financial Officer, Nomura International

“(Certification) helped to increase awareness of the contribution made by purchasing at the highest level of our organisation.” – Nick Wildgoose, Procurement Director, Zurich Financial Services