What SCMSDC Certification Means for Your Interpreting Vendor
Fortune 500 companies do not leave supplier diversity to chance. They use councils like SCMSDC to vet, certify, and connect with minority-owned businesses. If your interpreting provider carries this certification, it means they have been through a process most vendors never attempt.
What SCMSDC Is
The Southern California Minority Supplier Development Council is a regional affiliate of the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC). It certifies minority-owned businesses and connects them to corporate members actively seeking diverse suppliers.
SCMSDC certification is not a membership card. It requires proof of minority ownership, operational control, and business viability. The review process includes documentation, interviews, and verification. Once certified, the business is listed in a national database that corporate procurement teams use when sourcing vendors.
Why Corporations Use SCMSDC
Major corporations set annual supplier diversity targets. Many report these numbers to shareholders, regulatory bodies, and the public. To meet those targets, they need verified diverse suppliers across every category of spend, including language services.
SCMSDC gives them a vetted pool. When a procurement director at a Fortune 500 company searches the NMSDC database for interpreting services, only certified providers appear. Everyone else is invisible.
How This Connects to Interpreting
Corporate legal departments need interpreters for depositions, arbitrations, and internal investigations. HR departments need them for multilingual employee communications. Compliance teams need them for training programs delivered in multiple languages.
All of that spend can count toward diversity goals, but only if the vendor is certified.
What This Means for Procurement Teams
If you manage supplier diversity at a large organization, you already know the pressure to find qualified diverse vendors in specialized service categories. Language services is one of those categories where the options narrow quickly.
An SCMSDC-certified interpreting provider solves two problems at once. You get qualified language professionals, and you get credit toward your diversity spend targets.
The Verification Step Most People Skip
Ask your interpreting vendor if they are SCMSDC or NMSDC certified. Then verify it. The NMSDC maintains a searchable database. If a vendor claims certification but does not appear in that database, the claim is not valid.
Legitimate certified vendors will provide their certification number and expiration date without hesitation.
The Bottom Line
SCMSDC certification is not a marketing badge. It is a procurement tool used by the largest companies in the country to identify verified minority-owned businesses. In the interpreting industry, very few providers carry it.
Kaplan Interpreting Services is SCMSDC certified and listed in the NMSDC national database. When your organization needs interpreting services that count toward supplier diversity goals, the certification behind the provider matters. Call (833) 547-7770 or visit kaplaninterpreting.com/quote to request an interpreter.
CEO & Founder
Born in Dallas, Texas, Alexandra grew up surrounded by Spanish, English, Arabic, and Italian. After moving to Venezuela, Spanish became her primary language. She holds a Master's in Healthcare Administration from Washington University in St. Louis and is a California court certified and medical interpreter.
She founded Kaplan Interpreting Services after seeing an industry that treated interpreters as interchangeable and clients as ticket numbers. She built a protocol-driven operation where every interpreter is hand-selected and credentialed for the specific setting, every client has a dedicated point of contact, and risk management is built into every assignment.
Her career reached a historic milestone when she interpreted the conversation between President-elect Biden and Pope Francis. That assignment, along with engagements for Nike and the Summit of the Americas, set the standard for every client engagement that followed.
"The same protocols that protected that historic conversation now protect every assignment we handle."