Henry Ford Health is one of Michigan's largest health systems, with hospitals, medical centers, and pharmacy and retail operations anchored in Detroit. That footprint means a procurement spend that runs across clinical supplies, facilities, construction, IT, professional services, and everything that keeps a hospital running. If you want to sell into it, there is one front door, and it is not a phone call to a buyer you happened to meet. It's the vendor portal.
This guide walks through how to register, what Henry Ford's supplier diversity program actually requires, and the certifications that get a diverse business into the bidding room.
Start in the vendor portalEvery supplier relationship at Henry Ford Health begins with registration. The official supply chain page is blunt about it: "All businesses must begin their journey with Henry Ford through our vendor portal." That portal lives at henryford.starssmp.com, where you create a supplier profile, enter your business information, list your categories, and load the data that lands you in the database used for future RFPs, RFQs, and RFIs.
Registering is not the same as winning work. It puts you in the system so that when Strategic Sourcing builds a bid in your category, you can be identified and invited. Treat the profile like a living document. Keep your NAICS codes, certifications, capabilities, and contact details current, because a stale or thin profile is the easiest one for a sourcing manager to skip.
A few things to get right before you submit:
- Specific categories. Don't list "supplies." List the exact products and services you provide, in the language a hospital buyer would search.
- Certifications attached. If you hold a diversity certification, load it. This is the field that routes you into the supplier diversity track.
- A capability statement. A one-page summary of what you do, who you've served, and your differentiators makes your profile usable. If you don't have one, our capability statement builder can help you put one together.
Henry Ford Health has run a formal supplier diversity program for over a decade. The policy framework, adopted in 2012, set a clear accountability rule: projects of $20,000 or more must be competitively bid, and at least one diverse supplier has to be included in that bid process.
That single rule changes how you should think about getting in. You don't need to displace an incumbent through a relationship. You need to be the certified, registered, qualified diverse supplier that Strategic Sourcing is obligated to bring into the competition. The Supplier Diversity team works alongside Strategic Sourcing specifically to make sure diverse suppliers get identified, included, evaluated, and awarded as part of the formal bid, rather than as an afterthought.
The program tracks tier-one minority- and women-owned spend against a 12% goal. Tier-one means direct contracts between Henry Ford and the diverse supplier, not spend that flows through a prime. So the dollars the program reports are dollars going straight to businesses like yours.
Henry Ford also runs community outreach events that make introductions between diverse suppliers and system stakeholders. These matchmaking sessions are worth watching for. They are one of the few moments where you can put a face and a capability in front of the people who build the bids.
Which certifications Henry Ford recognizesHere is the part that decides whether your registration counts as a diverse supplier. Henry Ford does not self-certify your status and does not take your word for it. To be considered diverse, you need certification from one of the national certification councils.
In practice that means:
- NMSDC / MBE for minority-owned businesses, issued through the National Minority Supplier Development Council and its regional affiliates. The Michigan Minority Supplier Development Council is the relevant affiliate for Detroit-area businesses. If you're new to this, our NMSDC certification guide explains how the MBE process works.
- WBENC / WBE for women-owned businesses, through the Women's Business Enterprise National Council.
Henry Ford's own team has described the standard plainly: to be considered diverse, a supplier needs to be certified through a national council, whether that's a minority development council, a women's council, or a comparable body. If you hold a veteran, disability-owned, or LGBTQ+ certification, load it as well, and confirm with the supplier diversity team how it maps to their reporting. The safe assumption is that a recognized national certification is what unlocks the diverse-supplier track.
If you aren't certified yet, get that done before you chase the bid. A registration without a certification sits in the general supplier pool, not the diversity pool, and the 12% goal is the lever that pulls diverse suppliers into competition.
What Henry Ford Health buysA health system this size buys across a wide spread of categories. Clinical and medical-surgical supplies and pharmaceuticals are the obvious ones, but a large share of addressable spend sits in areas where diverse suppliers compete well: facilities maintenance, construction and skilled trades, food and nutrition services, office and janitorial supplies, IT hardware and services, marketing and print, staffing, and professional and consulting services.
If your business serves other large institutions, hospitals, universities, or municipalities, your capability set probably already maps to several of these categories. Look at where your existing public-sector or corporate references line up, and lead with those in your portal profile.
A realistic path inPut the steps in order. Get certified through the right national council. Register and build out a real profile in the StarSSMP portal at henryford.starssmp.com. Show up to a supplier diversity outreach event if one is available in your region. Then keep the profile fresh so you surface when a bid opens in your category.
Henry Ford is one institutional buyer. The same certification and capability work opens doors at dozens of other corporate and hospital programs, which is why it pays to build the foundation once and reuse it. You can see who else recognizes these certifications in our corporate program directory.
The slowest part of all this is usually the certification itself, between gathering documents, filing with the right council, and waiting on review. If that's the piece standing between you and the bid room, CertifyAll handles the paperwork and submission across the certifications Henry Ford recognizes, so you can spend your time on the capability statement and the buyers instead of the forms.
