Month: April 2019

Sustainability is a hot topic for many public institutions, but the conversation is especially active in higher education, where students and faculty are at the front-lines of sustainable development research and practice.

In the Sustainability in Education report, one third of respondents reported that sustainability was a strategic priority for their institution, while nearly all institutions have a sustainability policy in place.

These policies and priorities can manifest in many different ways on campus: everything from curricular expansion in the field of sustainability, to community programming, to green-building initiatives.

Many administrators are also looking internally at the standard operating procedures of their departments, to examine where they could make changes to their own process to support their institution’s sustainability commitments.

What is Sustainable Procurement?

Sustainable procurement is the adoption and integration of ethical and environmental concerns into your procurement processes and decisions, while also ensuring that they meet the needs of your business.

Many higher education procurement teams are beginning to implement formal sustainable procurement initiatives. These can have a huge impact—after all, each procurement decision represents the opportunity for institutions to choose environmentally and socially preferable products or services for their campus.

Formal initiatives aside, procurement teams have an immediate opportunity to make the procurement process itself more sustainable by reducing the reams of paper that flow through procurement departments every year.

Procurement’s paper footprint

In an article for Inside Higher Ed, Eric Sickler wrote about a recent experience as a vendor submitting to an RFP for a major American university. He notes that despite the university’s stated sustainability commitment, the requirements for this RFP specified the submission of numerous identical paper copies, amounting to nearly 1,000 printed and bound pages.

The irony was not lost on Sickler, as he asked:

“Is your department — and the departments with which you routinely collaborate — really walking your sustainability talk?”

While Sickler’s experience deals with a particularly detailed RFP, the procurement process is notoriously paper-heavy. The State of the RFP, a benchmarking study of billions of dollars of public sector RFP decisions, shows that the average RFP submission is 132 pages in length. Considering that the average project receives five submissions, with copies for an average of four to five evaluators, a single RFP project requires a total of 2,970 pages of paper.

Bringing your bid and RFP process online eliminates the need for paper instantly, resulting in a more sustainable procurement process.

The environmental impact of a paper procurement process

Paper savings are not just about the number of trees being cut down! As this infographic shows, paper production also requires a significant amount of water and electricity resources. Consider also the CO2 emissions from the delivery and transportation of paper RFPs from your vendors’ office to your campus.

By implementing paperless procurement process, Bonfire clients have saved a total of 31 million sheets of paper, equal to:  

• 3,767 trees
• 1,695 MWH of energy (enough to power a desktop computer for 11,300 years)
• 13 million gallons of water
• 104.8 tons of CO2 emissions

Digitizing procurement: good for you, your campus, and the planet

Sustainability improvements are a good news story for your institution. However, the environmental benefits of digitizing the procurement process are merely icing on the cake when you consider the advantages to procurement teams:

• Significant efficiency gains, resulting 50%+ shorter RFP cycle times
• Streamlined communication with internal departments
• Clear visibility and reduced risk

Bringing your procurement process online is a win-win, allowing you to ensure alignment with your institution’s commitment to sustainability, while also improving the process for your team.

Read more about the impact of paper RFPs in The True Cost of your Paper RFP.

This week, like many others, a new software developer joined the Bonfire Engineering team. However, for Mohammed Hakmi, the journey to Bonfire was longer than most. He is the first skilled immigrant admitted to Canada through Talent Beyond Boundaries (TBB), an NGO that matches refugees with employers seeking to fill skill shortages.

From Syria to Lebanon to Canada

In October 2011, Mohammed was forced to flee his home in Homs, Syria, where he was born and grew up. He was in his second year of university studying information technology and taking the year’s final exam when the school was bombed. When the conflict surrounding Homs escalated to the point that it was unsafe for him to remain in the city, he fled to Lebanon.

It was there that he became connected to Talent Beyond Boundaries and began the process which would eventually bring him to Canada as the newest member of the Bonfire team.  

“When the crisis started, all my dreams were destroyed. My dreams are relaunched now,” says Mohammed.

TBB bridges refugee talent and technology companies

Mohammed is the first candidate to move to Canada through an economic immigration pathway, a mobility solution that TBB is pioneering with Bonfire and other companies. This matches companies around the globe facing local talent shortages, with refugees who have in-demand skills but are invisible to the global workforce and often prohibited from working in host countries.

According to TBB, less than 1% of refugees access traditional resettlement, and the number of resettlement spaces globally is falling. TBB is working to connect refugees to international work opportunities to open an additional immigration pathways for refugees to rebuild their lives and careers.

Bonfire encourages local tech companies to get involved

Bonfire is thrilled for Mohammed to join the team, and equally excited to be part of developing a new mobility option for refugees globally.

As Bonfire’s Director of Engineering Kris Braun explains:

“Canada’s tech industry is growing at a fast rate, and we struggle to find good candidates. Refugees are trying to rebuild their lives after fleeing wars and conflicts. Part of it is to hold meaningful work. This is a win-win for us.”

And it doesn’t stop here. Bonfire is committed to developing further initiatives to promote diversity in hiring.

RELATED: A conversation with women of Bonfire on International Women’s Day

“This is not a one-time thing. This is part of how we think about ourselves as an employer,” Braun notes. “When you look at the magnitude of the refugee crisis, at the number of people displaced by conflict … Mohammed is one of many people. To have an impact as a region I think we need to be thinking about multiple companies hiring multiple people.”

Learn more about life at Bonfire to see if your next role is waiting for you.