Month: May 2020

It has never been more important, or more challenging, for procurement professionals to do their job.

At Bonfire, we’ve worked with hundreds of public agencies across North America, and we’ve seen firsthand that the demands on procurement are changing. In today’s fast-paced, connected world, you’re under a lot of pressure to deliver instant results for any competitive event. The challenges of COVID-19 have heightened that pressure, but they have also highlighted procurement’s potential to be more than simply an administrator of buying processes, but a strategic advisor to your agency.

Stepping into this new era of public procurement as a strategic partner means that simply digitizing your existing processes is table stakes. That’s why Bonfire Strategic Sourcing software is evolving to do more than bring your processes online. With new tools optimized for collaboration and built-in access to bid and RFP insights and templates (surfaced from our library of 40,000+ projects), the new Bonfire empowers procurement professionals to drive greater agency impact, achieve better outcomes, and engage colleagues along the way.

Back your decisions with Bonfire Benchmarking

As other departments become more data-driven, now it’s procurement’s turn.

We know how frustrating and time-consuming it can be to search Google or call up your procurement peers to find RFP templates to kick-off your process. That’s why we’ve introduced Bonfire Benchmarking, which gives you access to bid and RFP recommendations and templates surfaced from our library of 40,000+ competitive events. Now, you can walk into any planning meeting armed with the data you need to provide strategic guidance to your peers. You can set expectations for timelines, criteria weighting, vendor participation, and requested documents.

Connect with your peers to drive better outcomes with Bonfire Intake

When we asked our clients what their request intake process looked like, many answered the same—back-and-forth emails, or even a conversation in the hallway. With no formal request process, prioritization and planning can be a challenge for your procurement team—often resulting in procurement being brought-in late and asked to execute on strategies that didn’t involve any strategic procurement input.

Bonfire Intake formalizes your request process with digital tools that make it easy to work with procurement. Now, you can integrate strategic planning at the start of every project, setting-up all your bids and RFPs to succeed. Digital tools make it easy for your peers to bring their requests, and in-app templates lighten the load on your internal stakeholders by setting expectations early.

Bonfire Intake provides one central place for all planning, executing, and contract activity, improving project visibility for buyers and forecasting budget and spend for your leadership team.

Launch price-only bids faster than ever before

Whether you call them bids, quotes, or invitationals, running quick and compliant price-driven bids is critical to meet the fast-paced demands of your agency. That’s why we’ve built new tools and templates to go to market fast and get immediate results, so your team can get out of the weeds of administrative work and find new opportunities to drive additional value in your bids. 

With our new price-only bids features, manage compliance with electronically sealed bids and templates, and prepare for vendor debriefs with audit reports that track all data and interactions. Automatically tabulate and sort vendor offers, optimized with data visualizations that help you quickly identify the lowest bidder. 

Introducing a new design to serve you better

On top of all these exciting product innovations, we’ve given the Bonfire platform a bit of a makeover, informed by client research and testing. Everything you love about Bonfire is still there, but the interface is now faster, cleaner, and easier than ever before for your buyers and your stakeholders to learn and use.

The new Bonfire has everything you need to make confident and data-driven decisions at every stage of the sourcing process, and this blog post only offers a glimpse into what we’ve been working on to enable you to step into a new era of public procurement. Whether you’re currently a Bonfire client or you’re looking for an eSourcing tool that does more than simply bring your processes online, dig deeper into the new Bonfire in our upcoming webinar on June 18 at 1 PM ET.

It’s no secret that COVID-19—and, for many, the added challenge of working from home—is changing how procurement is done.

In our “Working Remotely” webinar, Bonfire’s Chief Client & Product Officer, Omar Salaymeh, sat down with four public procurement professionals on the impact this crisis has had on their processes and how their teams are adapting to a new remote work reality. Despite the diversity of the panelists’ industries spanning local government, higher education, and public healthcare, four trends emerged as major lessons learned in overcoming obstacles during this critical time.

It just goes to show that procurement teams across North America are facing similar challenges, and we hope this summary of procurement best practices learned by fellow experts in the field can enable you to continue tackling these unprecedented procurement challenges with confidence.

Creativity is key

To meet your constituents’ new and unexpected needs at this time, creativity is a critical skill for procurement teams.

For Jay Ayres, Director of Group Purchasing Organization at St. Joseph’s Health System, sourcing innovation starts with asking the right questions. “When there is an emergency and a need, the first question isn’t ‘what product do we need?’” said Jay. “The first question is ‘what’s the problem we’re trying to solve?’ That made a big difference in how people thought and approached things.”

He then gave the example of a long-term care facility, where residents could no longer eat in the dining area and needed overbed tables so that they could eat in their rooms. With many other facilities across North America facing similar challenges, national shortages meant that Jay’s team needed to find another solution that would address the problem they faced—which included sourcing folding TV tables.

Paul J. Brennan, Director of Purchasing for the County of Rockland, also noted that, in this climate of national shortages, sourcing methods need to be creative, too. The County of Rockland had a lot of success using LinkedIn to discover suppliers with available inventory. Paul’s team also started partnering with other agencies to procure supplies from vendors that had minimum order quantities that were higher than their organization needed.

Vendor relationships are more important than ever before

As inventory shortages continue to present challenges to public procurement teams, all the panelists on our webinar agreed that this crisis has further highlighted the importance of strong relationships between procurement and suppliers.

“We have been doing unconventional methods of procuring PPE,” said Joel Neaveill, Director of Procurement for the Louisville Metro Government. “It really comes down to, where were your relationships prior, and how can you leverage those relationships to get closer to the manufacturer and those supplies.”

Jay had a similar experience. When looking for overbed tables, vendors who didn’t have any inventory were able to give them a lead to who might. Following those leads, Jay’s team was able to create a list of vendors who distributed overbed tables, consistently communicating and interacting with the vendors to know when stock would become available. “Two weeks later, we got a call from somebody who works for a city,” said Jay. “They said, ‘we have an emergency in our long-term care facility, and we need 20+ overbed tables immediately.’ Instead of spending three days, we were able to resolve their issue in less than two hours.”

According to the panelists, strengthening their relationships with vendors in this time isn’t on pause—it just looks different. Jay’s team at St. Joseph’s Health System was able to help out their vendors (and simultaneously shorten their cycle times) by exporting previous RFPs from Bonfire that included information on lead times, pricing, warranty, service, and training into a spreadsheet. Rather than having vendors start from scratch, Jay’s team sent them the spreadsheet, and then confirmed their permission to proceed and asked if there were any changes. “What would’ve taken weeks for them to do, they were able to give it back in a day,” said Jay.

Procurement has a unique opportunity to support local business

In the midst of economic uncertainty, procurement is critical to stimulating the economy. After all, government procurement accounts for 12 percent of GDP. All the webinar panelists agreed that procurement not only has the responsibility to engage local business at this time—but local businesses might also be the key to overcoming some unique procurement challenges.

“What I’ve found to be very helpful is not to count out the little guy,” said Paul. When major medical supply distributors were experiencing shortages, Paul’s team happened to find a local dental supply vendor that had excess inventory of gloves, masks, and PPE.

Joel also understands procurement’s role in driving the local economy, and his team is coming up with new and innovative ideas to support local businesses in this time. “Our local economy, like everyone’s local economy, is just hurting so much, especially the restaurant and hospitality industries, so we’re turning to them to help supply part of the response to the emergency.”

These projects included mobilizing local caterers to feed seniors, using hotels to house first responders who are healthy but don’t want to risk infecting their homes, and commissioning a sewing shop to custom-make face masks for Louisville Metro Government employees. “We also have a list of minority- and women-owned businesses to ensure we’re equitably responding to this emergency,” said Joel.

A lot of these changes are here to stay

When we asked the panelists if they believed the changes caused by COVID-19 and remote work would continue once things go “back to normal,” the answer was unanimously yes—for the most part.

“We want to go back to campus,” said Travis Temeyer, Director of Purchasing and Procurement at Eastern Michigan University. “We love being with our students. But we’ve realized that more of our faculty and staff can work remotely, and that is something that I think is going to stay. From an academic perspective, the marketplace wants online education, so we’ll probably have more offerings of that.”

Paul believes that new technologies, including virtual meetings, will continue at the County of Rockland. “Our county government is two main campuses, about 15 minutes apart,” said Paul. “When you have to drive back and forth for different meetings, you’re wasting an hour of your day. This crisis has pushed the use of virtual tools out there, and I think that’s definitely going to continue going forward.”

Jay has also seen one big change that he hopes will continue; when procuring expensive and complex medical equipment, their process previously required a site visit to physically view products from the top three vendors of choice. Often, these site visits required international travel. In lieu of this, Jay’s team has been doing virtual site visits to view the equipment and ask questions. These virtual site visits have been highly successful, and have saved the agency a lot of time and money.

Even as some organizations start to go back to the office, Jay believes it’s important for agencies to ensure their procurement processes are still work-from-home-ready. “We need to be ready for COVID coming back or the next pandemic that’s going to arrive,” he said.

To hear even more procurement best practices learned during COVID-19, watch the full panel webinar here.