Month: March 2020

It’s no secret that procurement teams are facing unprecedented challenges right now. As provincial/state and local governments, schools, and public healthcare respond to COVID-19, procurement teams are working around-the-clock to ensure emergency procurements continue to happen quickly and compliantly. On top of that, you may even be navigating a new and unfamiliar reality of working from home. 

I say it in the video below—procurement plays a vital role in any crisis. Now, more than ever, it’s critical that you meet project deadlines to serve the constituents who are looking to your public agency for help in times like these. As a leader in North American procurement technology, we want to help. 

Over the past few weeks, Bonfire has heard so much client feedback that our strategic sourcing platform is playing a critical role in ensuring their procurements rise to the challenge in these uncertain times. Now, we want to help more public agencies meet their business continuity plans—which is why we have developed our Bonfire COVID-19 Emergency Response Program to offer our platform for free to public sector organizations in North America. I go into some more detail in my rather low-budget video below (when you’re practicing social distancing and don’t have any fancy equipment around your house, you do what you need to do!). 

If you’re unfamiliar with Bonfire, our software brings the historically paper-and-Excel procurement process online, from bid and RFP listing, to vendor submission, to bid/proposal evaluation, to awarding a contract quickly and compliantly. 

Our Emergency Response Program is completely free-of-charge and there is no obligation to continue with Bonfire once the Program is complete. The Program for new users includes:

• Free access until July 31, 2020 for users, evaluators, vendors, and unlimited bid and RFx projects
• Ability to create, solicit, evaluate, and award bids remotely with simple online tools
• Access to Bonfire’s large vendor network. Additionally, there are no fees for vendors to view bid documents or submit responses
• Group implementation and training to get you up-and-running quickly
• In-app collaboration tools and data visualizations to bring evaluation meetings online and facilitate decision-making

At Bonfire, we currently help more than 350 public sector organizations action the mission-critical procurements that meet their constituents’ needs—even when working remotely. 

We know that in times like these, there is so much uncertainty, and the demands on procurement are greater than ever. We want to assure you that we at Bonfire are here for you, and we’ll get through this together. 

All the best,

Corry 

We won’t beat around the bush—it’s no secret that public procurement teams are under more pressure than ever before. With more and more organizations mandating remote work as the COVID-19 situation continues to evolve in North America and around the world, procurement teams are facing new and uncertain challenges.

This unforeseen and ever-evolving climate we find ourselves in requires urgent procurements that address public health and safety. Not only are you faced with these urgent and unexpected procurement needs, but maybe some of your critical evaluators aren’t even in the office. When getting vendor documents and evaluation scorecards in the hands of stakeholders is next to impossible, the risks of project delays or poor procurement compliance only increase.

And it’s more critical than ever that your procurement team meets project deadlines. The citizens that you’re serving, whether you work for a city, a school, or a hospital, are directly impacted by how fast-acting your procurement process is. Our society relies on the support of the public sector, especially in trying times like these. 

As more and more teams transition to remote procurement, we are committed to ensuring that the citizens you serve get access to the goods and services they need because of on-track and fast-acting procurement timelines. That’s why Bonfire has launched an Emergency Response Program, offering free access to the Bonfire Strategic Sourcing software for new users.

With that in mind, we hope that this blog post can provide you with the toolkit you need to minimize disruptions as you prepare to transition to remote procurement.

Collaborate remotely by bringing sourcing online

If there’s one department that can’t afford to slow down in times like these, it’s procurement. Not only are you procuring critical supplies and services—such as hand sanitizer dispensers, or contracted professional services to take on the work of out-of-office staff—but so much of our already fragile economy depends on procurement running business-as-usual. When public procurement slows down, contracts don’t get signed, and vendors dependent on those contracts struggle to remain in business—possibly resulting in job losses or closing shop. In times like these, there is a lot riding on the shoulders of public procurement teams to keep your local and national economies from reaching a stand-still. 

That’s a lot of pressure—and it’s only amplified when critical buyers and evaluators aren’t in the office, or your organization mandates a work-from-home policy. 

Manual, paper-based processes will likely cause major delays in your procurement processes. Disseminating documents to out-of-office staff is a logistical challenge, and receiving shipments of vendor proposals is out of the question when your office is shut-down. 

To prepare your sourcing strategy for the potential reality of remote work, it may be time to bring all your procurement activities online. And we don’t mean an online spreadsheet, where different iterations and revisions are hard to track and conversations still have to happen over back-and-forth emails.

Investing in online sourcing software (or accessing Bonfire for free at this time) brings all of your sourcing activities online, centralizing all necessary documents and evaluation processes and making them accessible from anywhere. Tools designed for collaboration and communication can reduce your bid and RFP evaluation times significantly by minimizing the number of evaluation meetings you need to get procurement and stakeholders on the same page. In times like these, a fast-acting procurement process is mission-critical to meeting your agency’s needs.

Ease vendor stress with online submission

With everything going on at your agency, it’s easy to allow a focus on vendor relationships to fall through the cracks. But vendors are experiencing a lot of anxiety right now, too. Vendors are thinking, will my contracts be signed? Will there be someone at the procurement office to receive my paper submissions? Is it worth it to put so much time, effort, and resources into an intensive RFP when I’m already short-staffed?

The climate of uncertainty that we’re in presents a unique opportunity to strengthen your vendor relationships like never before. 

Travel and delivery services are so uncertain right now, causing a lot of stress for vendors who depend on these services to meet bid and RFP solicitation deadlines. By bringing your bid and RFP submission online, vendors no longer have to factor in shipping times as they respond to already urgent solicitations. With many vendors already short-staffed, the extra submission time could be game-changing in ensuring more vendors bid, increasing your vendor competition and securing better value for the goods or services you’re acquiring. 

Leverage other remote work software 

At Bonfire, we’ve heard a lot of stories from our public procurement clients on how they’ve leveraged other remote work software to augment their remote procurement capabilities. 

If you have previously opened vendor bids in a physical meeting place, there are online meeting and webinar software—like Zoom or GoToWebinar—that can enable you to continue bid openings as per usual, regardless of attendees’ physical locations. 

Although collaboration tools within eSourcing platforms help limit meetings, when those consensus meetings do need to take place in-person, you can leverage those same online meeting tools to keep everyone aligned and keep projects on track.

These are undoubtedly uncertain times that we’re in, and the pressure on procurement to be fast-acting and aligned with stakeholders to serve the urgent needs of your agency is greater than ever. Perhaps on the positive side of all this, as organizations urgently switch to remote procurement as health officials promote social distancing to “flatten the curve” of the COVID-19 outbreak, is that we will have a lot of lessons learned as we enter a future where remote work progressively becomes the norm, even in the public sector. 

We understand that moving your strategic sourcing processes online is no small task, especially in the midst of a global health crisis that is directly impacting your agency and the citizens you serve. We’re here to help. Bonfire brings procurement online to keep critical projects on track. Find out more about our program to enable access to the Bonfire Strategic Sourcing platform for free.

Do your eProcurement and contract management operate separately? It may be time to consider housing them in one software. 

At Bonfire, we’ve had the opportunity to work with a lot of organizations that are passionate about finding the perfect eProcurement software that will bring their processes online, reduce their environmental impact, align stakeholders, and improve consistency. But why not bring those benefits to your contract management, too? 

After all, sourcing and contract management are intrinsically connected; in one stage, you’re evaluating the best vendor. In the other, you’re tracking their performance and deciding whether it’s a relationship worth renewing.

At the end of the day, both have the same goal—to drive the most value for the goods or services you need. So why are you treating them as separate? 

On today’s blog, we’re exploring 5 reasons why managing your contracts in your eProcurement software is a good idea. 

1. Automatically generate contracts from awarded proposals

You’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and resources to find the perfect candidate for your bid or RFP—now it’s time to create the contract. When your procurement and contract management are hosted together, all the data you need to generate a new contract is already there for you to pull from.

For example, in Bonfire, you can save time and ensure consistency by creating templates that are pre-configured to include the default details, documents, and people for a given contract type. Since vendor information is already stored in Bonfire, you can create a contract record that automatically carries over relevant information (such as public files from the original project and the awarded vendor’s submission documents) from the procurement project into the contract record. 

2. Evaluate vendor performance

Sourcing and contract management operate in a cycle; first, you have to evaluate bids or RFPs to find the best vendor, then you work with that vendor, then you evaluate their performance, then you have to decide whether you continue that relationship or go back out to the market for that contract when it’s up for renewal—and the cycle starts again. So it makes sense that you would want to manage vendor performance in the same place where you host your strategic sourcing activities. 

In Bonfire’s Contract and Performance Module, for instance, users can create surveys to measure vendor performance, add respondents that will receive the survey, view survey results and frequency, export survey results, and view trends from past surveys to track improvement. 

3. Track important milestones in your contract lifecycle management

Once you’ve evaluated the performance of your vendors, you’ll want to track important contract dates like lead time and end date so that you can prepare to renew contracts or go back to the market. 

In Bonfire, a calendar heatmap provides you with a high-level view of important upcoming dates. Dark-color days signify more contracts expiring for greater values, allowing you to prioritize your time accordingly. You can set reminders on the lead times of relevant contracts to you.

Additionally, by selecting an individual contract you get a visual timeline of various terms of the individual contract, important dates, and custom reminders that you set for yourself. 

4. Go green

Does your organization have a “digital transformation” or “go green” mandate that led you to invest in an eProcurement solution? You wouldn’t be alone; our friends at Ventura County transitioned from a paper-based procurement process to an eProcurement solution and saved 170,000 pages of paper in one year, reducing their environmental footprint (not to mention shredding costs!). 

Why stop at procurement? With your contract management activities integrated into your eProcurement software, you can view contract information on a central dashboard, filter contracts to locate the information you need, and export custom reports to Excel—no physical paper required. 

5. Share insights seamlessly

Many of us have invested in eProcurement solutions because we know the power that data and insights can have in making more proactive and strategic decisions. And the same goes for contract management!

In Bonfire’s Contract and Performance Module, all the information you need is in one place and easily exportable. You can also give other users in your organization access to contract details (to view or edit), so all contract stakeholders are on the same page. 

Learn more about how Bonfire’s eProcurement and contract management work together on our Bonfire Contract and Performance Management page. Or, if you’re already a Bonfire client, contact your Client Experience Manager today.