Supplier readiness programs for primes and mid-tier contractors who are responsible for their supply chain's compliance status. We survey your supplier base, tier it by risk, move at-risk suppliers through standardized readiness tracks, and report progress to you quarterly. Your flow-down exposure becomes a program with a number on it.
DFARS 252.204-7012 is in every applicable contract, NIST SP 800-171 is the standard behind it, and flow-down makes you responsible for the compliance of your subcontractors. What you have to go on is what each supplier attests to and the SPRS score behind that attestation. That is the layer between your supply chain and your liability.
The exposure is structural. A supplier whose attestation cannot survive scrutiny can disqualify a team, stall a delivery order, or put your own affirmations at risk. You cannot deliver compliance to your suppliers yourself; that is cost, liability, and headcount outside your mission. But you cannot ignore it either, because the obligation is contractual and the liability is yours.
Most primes know their own status. Very few can defend their suppliers'. That gap is the program.
The program converts an open-ended liability into a bounded, reportable engagement. Every stage has a defined scope, a stated fee, and a deliverable you can put in front of leadership.
The program shapes to how you want to fund it, from fully sponsored to zero-cost endorsement. Every model delivers the same standardized readiness work and the same quarterly reporting.
You purchase the Snapshot and quarterly reporting. Suppliers fund their own remediation at pre-negotiated program rates. You get visibility; they get a path; nobody negotiates pricing twice.
You subsidize a portion of remediation for critical or sole-source suppliers, the ones whose readiness you cannot afford to leave to chance. Everyone else pays program rates.
Where a DoD Mentor-Protégé agreement exists, CMMC compliance assistance qualifies as developmental assistance. You fund the protégé's readiness; DoD reimburses the cost.
Zero cost to you. You distribute the program to your supplier base at pre-negotiated rates and receive aggregate readiness reporting. The lightest lift, and often where programs start.
A supplier program lives or dies on consistency. Thirty suppliers prepared thirty different ways produces thirty different outcomes, and a dashboard nobody trusts. Stehrling delivers every supplier through the same standardized tracks, documented the same way, evidenced the same way, and measured against the same bar: what an assessor will actually accept.
Every engagement is led by a CCA or CCP credentialed practitioner. Our team holds CCA and CCP credentials, has spent 15+ years inside the DIB, and has worked with top-five defense primes. We know what evidence holds up, what documentation gets challenged, and where suppliers consistently stall. That experience is what makes the quarterly numbers you brief upward defensible.
Your suppliers' enclave vendors and MSPs stay in the picture. We complete what they deploy. A compliant solution is not a compliant organization, and the organizational half is where supplier readiness programs are won.
Talk to a practitioner about your supplier population, your program dates, and what a Snapshot would cover. We'll tell you honestly whether a program fits your situation. Expect a reply within one business day.
Talk to a Practitioner →
An independent firm building NIST 800-171 compliance programs and AI governance for defense contractors and the DIB.