Month: December 2019

At Bonfire, we understand your needs are continually evolving. We’re always looking to our clients for guidance on today’s challenges and to understand how we’re helping you find solutions. 2019 was no exception with the introduction of new offerings and feature enhancements designed to deliver best-practices, optimize workflows, and increase bid competition. 

Here’s a recap of some of the exciting things that launched this year at Bonfire.

New Services and Continuous Learning

Services define a significant part of the Bonfire experience. We often hear that our people make a big difference in the adoption and ongoing engagement with eSourcing inside their organization. This year, we’re excited to launch more opportunities for customers to learn and growth with Bonfire.

Check out all of the best practices content here:

Multi-category Decisions, Questionnaires, and Bid Tables
Contract and Performance Management, Centralizing Procurement

Feature Launches that Strengthen Public-Sector Workflows

Proposal Analysis

Proposal Analysis adds intuitive visuals to Bonfire that make it easy to compare and contrast different data points such as how an individual vendor performed in relation to the top and average score in each criteria segment.

Then, you can filter and display the data in different ways to fuel more productive consensus meetings, negotiations, recommendations, and during vendor debrief meetings.

Quick Online Bid Entry

Quick Online Bid Entry makes it easy for vendors to enter detailed order list pricing online. As a buyer, you define your specific needs, such as quantity, brand, size, etc., then all that your vendors need to do is fill in your pricing form.

Results are auto-calculated and easily analyzed in Bonfire to award by vendor, basket, or even line-item.

Custom Event Management

Custom Event Management lets you add events to your official timeline and brings more of your project online in one central place so everyone is on the same page.

Event types include vendor-facing events such as pre-bid meetings, interviews, and public bid openings, or internal-facing events such as pre-evaluation kick-offs and consensus meetings.

Requested Information Management

Requested Information Management makes it easy to group and organize the information that you need your vendors to provide. Simply add a new group and then add, drag, or drop the corresponding documents or data.

From there, you can reorder groups and documents to make it easy for vendors to understand exactly what they need to provide.

Product Launches that Help Buyers Receive More Bids

Extending your pool of vendors is critical to increase your competition and in turn, get better quality for a better price. In an effort to support you in doing so, we’ve launched a new vendor portal designed to connect you with vendors who are already working with other Bonfire customers as well as with vendors who are interested in public sector opportunities.

Every public opportunity you post will be available to the growing Bonfire vendor community.

An RFP evaluation process goes beyond simple bids and price-only decisions and requires assessing both qualitative and quantitative factors. For many public sector organizations, this is where the largest spending decisions are made. The impact that these decisions make can have a ripple effect that can be felt for years, which is why making the right choice is essential to your organization.

Here are 4 common pitfalls buying organizations make during the evaluation process and how you can avoid them in order to achieve the best possible outcomes. 

Mistake 1: Weighting the price too high

Why it matters
Weighting the price high is often seen as being “price conscious,” but it can skew the outcomes that you are trying to achieve. Organizations that value price too highly run the risk of buying goods or services that are inexpensive, but that also under-deliver.  

*According to Bonfire State of the RFP data insights, a 15% increase in price will change the outcome of one in three RFPs* 

How to achieve better outcomes
Best practices indicate that weighting price at 20-30% is ideal. Before you begin a project, determine what criteria will truly make the difference between success and failure and assign weight accordingly. If you are getting pressured by the business unit influencing the project, show them how increasing the price weighting would impact the outcome so that they understand the implications.

Mistake 2: Unclear evaluation scales

Why it matters
Some teams don’t use a scale at all and allow evaluators to assign their own point value to each component, leading to confusion and too much variation in scores. Others use a three-point scale, which doesn’t offer enough variation in score and makes it difficult to make a significant distinction between proposals.

How to achieve better outcomes
A five to ten point scale offers evaluators a good range so that they are able to make distinctions between evaluations. By clearly establishing this rule, you’ll enable consistency and alignment across stakeholders when running an evaluation. 

Mistake 3: Separating price scales

Why it matters
There is a phenomenon called ‘the lower bid bias.’ When evaluators are made aware of price when evaluating qualitative factors, a systematic bias occurs toward the lowest bidder. This was proven conclusively during a study conducted by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Favouring the lowest bid regardless of qualitative factors could have similar negative outcomes as weighting price too highly in an evaluation.

How to achieve better outcomes
To eliminate bias, the study recommended a two-stage process where price is revealed to the same group of evaluators as qualitative factors, but only after they have evaluated the non-price components of a bid. Alternatively, you could have a different evaluation group for pricing than you do for qualitative factors. 

Mistake 4: Not making decisions by consensus

Why it matters
Many teams attempt to simplify their process by averaging their evaluator’s scores. However if one evaluator gives a score of 2 out of 5, and another a 5, then the average score of a 3.33 isn’t a truly representative conclusion. It could suggest that there was a misunderstanding either in the proposal or the scoring criteria, or even a scoring bias that could impact the final decision. 

*37% of RFPs feature a lack of consensus, indicating this is a commonly occurring issue among evaluators.*

How to achieve better outcomes
When there is a significant variance in scores teams should hold consensus meetings to understand the discrepancy and come to an agreement. It can be useful to complete all comments and scoring beforehand so that the facilitator is able to focus the conversation on the areas of disagreement. A well-run meeting can get evaluators to a place of understanding and help outliers come to an agreed-upon decision. 

How technology can help

Using technology to conduct your sourcing events is more efficient than with email, Excel, and paper. This gives your team more time and focus to run effective evaluations and ultimately achieve better outcomes.  

Do you want to uncover how Bonfire can help you run seamless evaluations? Attend one of our weekly live product demonstrations to learn more.