Month: September 2020

September 2020 marks about 6 months since COVID-19 first started seriously impacting government agencies across North America. 

In May, Bonfire’s Chief Client & Product Officer, Omar Salaymeh, sat down with public procurement professionals to understand how they were responding in the thick of COVID-19-related purchases, stay at home orders, and supply chain shortages.

How has procurement changed and evolved since? Which pivots are temporary, and which are here to stay? What does the “next normal” of procurement look like? 

To answer these questions, Omar once again gathered procurement experts representing cities, states, school districts, and even public seaport authorities to understand what lessons have been learned these past 6 months, and what a new path forward looks like. Here are just a few of the themes we uncovered in that webinar. 

Many agencies are still focused on COVID-19 efforts

The dust may have settled from the initial scramble to address emergency response while working from home or with limited staff in the office, but COVID-19-related projects still dominate most public procurement teams’ priority lists. 

For Erik Lueders, Director of Sustainability & Purchasing at Parkway School District, this has meant that a lot of strategic projects that weren’t related to remote learning, PPE, or re-entry have been put on hold. He and his team have had to be reactive to ever-evolving plans on how to return students to school safely; for instance, the start of this school year was originally planned to be in-person, but with a recent spike in COVID cases, schools are now 100% virtual. 

“There continues to be these iterations of important impending deadlines, and with each one of those dates brings on a new set of needs, goods, and services that we need to get in place,” said Erik.

The emergency declaration is still in place for the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services, according to Wendy Mitchell Brown, who works in contracts management and procurement. Their focus continues to be on purchasing contact tracing software, engaging consultants to help with social media messaging around COVID as well as to help hire contact tracers, and stocking up on PPE. 

Technology implementations are here to stay

The panelists agreed that there have been some benefits realized by the push to implement technology to ensure processes were running smoothly amidst the disruption. Maija Lampinen, Procurement Contracts Manager at the Port of Everett, mentioned that they are in the process of updating their telecommute policy to offer the flexibility to work from home a few days per week. Thanks to the technology implementations pushed over the past several months, the infrastructure is in place to enable those changes.

Technology has also played a critical role in creating a positive vendor experience even as proposal submission and evaluation processes needed to change.

Although the Delaware Department of Health and Social Services never went fully remote, they needed to limit public access to the building. Wendy’s team implemented Bonfire Strategic Sourcing Software to bring their vendor submission process online instead of requiring vendors to come into the office to hand in proposals. She even had an instance where a vendor missed the communication about the change and dropped off a hard-copy submission at the office by mistake. “One of my staff got on the phone with the gentleman and told him what was going on. He actually went to our Bonfire hub page on his smartphone in his pick-up truck, and was able to complete the information and upload all his documents in less than an hour, and was able to successfully bid.”

Maija has also seen how technology has created a positive experience for vendors. “We’ve gone to online bid openings and online pre-bid meetings as much as possible. I’ve gotten very positive feedback from our vendors, suppliers, and contractors. They really like the efficiency of being able to log in from their office, attend a bid opening, and not drive through Seattle traffic to deliver a bid or open it.”

Overcoming supply shortages means embracing a “jack of all trades, master of none” mindset

In our poll of webinar attendees, we found that only 7% of respondents never experienced any supply chain disruptions since the start of COVID—the other 93% had experienced them, and almost half of that portion were still experiencing them. 

For Christine Finney, Materials Manager at the City of Peoria, Arizona, navigating these challenges meant keeping an open mind and remaining nimble as they searched for alternative suppliers. It also meant her team needed to know a little about a lot to identify credible sources. “At my level, I certainly don’t know about sanitizers and what percent alcohol is needed. But we’ve had to make ourselves aware of that and make sure we’re not passing off that responsibility to someone else, because I don’t know who that someone else would be.”

Erik agreed that an important skill for procurement teams right now is a healthy sense of skepticism, and making sure they knew what questions to ask even if they weren’t the subject matter experts in these particular areas. “We had a lot of decentralized purchasing, but with these new categories that these departments weren’t familiar with, we had to re-centralize a lot of purchasing. We needed a certain level of oversight so teachers weren’t just getting a bunch of bleach to use in their classrooms.”

Creative thinking is shifting from optimizing speed to cost savings

There’s no question that public procurement teams have had to think outside the box to get taxpayers the goods and services they need during a pandemic.

“Piggyback” and co-operative contracts have been useful for all the panelists for fulfilling urgent needs quickly over the past 6 months, but there is a general understanding that those are not the most cost-effective option compared to obtaining quotes or running an RFP. “In order to be a strategic partner in our organization, we want to make sure that cost savings is at the front of our mind, but we also look at best-value in everything that we do,” said Christine.

In fact, according to the panelists, procurement’s creative energy has shifted from how to acquire supplies as soon as possible, to taking creative approaches to achieve cost savings for their organization.

Maija at the Port of Everett, for instance, has been re-evaluating existing contracts to discover cost savings opportunities. “We have a laundry service for our walk-off mats. Do they need to be every week? Or can we do that once a month? Are we going to realize a lot of savings there, maybe not, but every little bit of savings helps. It also helps the morale of the staff, realizing they’re making decisions to help benefit the bottom-line.”

These are only a few examples that our panelists provided of ways they are thinking and innovating to prepare for the “next normal” of procurement. To hear even more insights on how procurement teams are innovating and paving a new path forward in the midst of COVID-19, watch the full webinar here.

Ever since the start of COVID-19, public procurement teams have had to adapt their processes. One big change was the way they received vendor submissions; with social distancing in place and as many as 98% of procurement teams working from home, it became nearly impossible for vendors to drop off their printed submissions at procurement offices. Procurement teams needed a submission alternative if they wanted to get emergency supplies and services to their constituents in the midst of a pandemic. 

That’s why many public procurement teams turned to email to accept bid and RFP submissions. Although at face value that may seem like a reasonable solution to these new challenges, email was not designed to handle the rigor of public procurement, and its limitations could have potential legal ramifications that could cost you your job or start a lawsuit at your organization. After all, the pandemic doesn’t give procurement a free ride from remaining accountable to taxpayers, as many recent re-evaluation and re-tender orders issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) demonstrate. 

Here are the top three reasons why accepting vendor submissions via email can get you or your agency in a lot of trouble—and what you can do about it. 

1. Receiving email vendor submissions is like herding cats

Although simple and straightforward on the surface, receiving email vendor submissions can become really messy, really quickly. Some consequences are obvious—submissions could end up in your junk mail and get missed, or strict public sector firewalls might block the email from coming in altogether.

Then there are the consequences that are not so immediately obvious. For example, there could be a delay in email receipt due to a slow connection, resulting in inaccurate timestamps. You might mark the submission as “late” because it arrived in your mailbox 5 minutes past the deadline, but the vendor swears they sent it with 20 minutes to spare. How can you prove who is right?

Even file sizes can become a problem. Did the vendor mistakenly think that it was a multi-envelope submission or did they just have to send multiple emails because the files were too large to send in one email? 

Email submissions open up so many opportunities for vendors to challenge you—and that’s before you even open the email.

2. Speaking of opening emails, how can you prove you did it at the appropriate time?

One critical limitation of email submissions is the fact that there is no way for you to prove that you did not open and review the email prior to the deadline or at an appropriate point in the evaluation process.

Again, this limitation makes the situation ripe for public scrutiny and questioning. Even if you still hold a “public opening” over a video conferencing app, for example, can you really provide a satisfactory, evidence-based response if a vendor asks, “Can you guarantee you did not open the file attached in our email prior to opening?” 

All it takes is for one vendor to challenge the process to start a lawsuit. And the reality is that, with email submissions, proving that you did not open and look at it before the deadline is simply impossible.

3. Audit trails are out of the question.

How do you keep an audit trail for email submissions? Through an email thread? Emails don’t capture anything other than, well, emails. They don’t include important things like evaluator notes and logs of who opened them. So chances are, your audit trail is going to be incomplete.

Not to mention that records requests are incredibly time-consuming. Think about how long it takes you to find one specific email when you’re looking for a piece of information—now imagine having to dig up hundreds of emails pertaining to a particular bid or RFP and trying to piece everything together.

With an incomplete audit trail, defending decisions becomes that much harder. Don’t forget that even in a pandemic, the public sector is still held to pre-pandemic compliance standards, and you will be expected to provide concrete evidence for your decisions if they’re challenged. In the past few months, the GAO has had to order multiple state departments to re-evaluate proposals and make new sourcing decisions because there was no audit trail to justify evaluation conclusions. 

We get it—with the world turning upside-down and a State of Emergency being declared in many places, procurement teams have had to think on their feet and quickly adapt to the situation. But there are ways to be innovative and agile that don’t put your job and your agency on the line.

Bonfire Strategic Sourcing Software is built for the rigor of public sector procurement. With built-in compliance requirements, online bid submission capabilities, and mandatory evaluator comments within the platform to ensure complete audit trails, you can eliminate email from your process altogether. Learn more by booking a demo with us.

In a post-COVID-19 world, governments won’t be returning to business-as-usual. With new functions such as disease monitoring and social distancing regulation, Deloitte calls this new operating model the “next normal” of work.

According to Deloitte, the response to the pandemic is highlighting many of government’s orthodoxies—the “that’s-the-way-it’s-always-been-done” ways of working that often go unstated and unquestioned. When COVID-19 started impacting North America, many public procurement teams had to come face-to-face with those orthodoxies, transforming their operations to adapt to emergency response and remote work. In the midst of all that forced change, procurement teams realized significant improvements, such as project efficiency, strengthened relationships with internal partners, and the power of procurement’s strategic contribution.

In this blog, we’ll outline three trends that emerged in government procurement due to COVID-19, and how you can embrace them to prepare for the “next normal” in procurement. 

Adaptable and efficient procurement will become the norm

In our State of Public Sourcing: COVID-19 Edition report, we found that procurement teams were doing what they could to streamline projects and get emergency supplies to the frontlines quickly and compliantly. RFP projects had a 15% decrease in the average number of evaluators per project, and non-RFP projects (such as price-driven bids or invitationals) had a 6% decrease. Across all projects, the average number of pages per vendor submission went from 207 to 156 (25% decrease), likely because procurement teams were reducing and re-prioritizing criteria so that proposals could be submitted by vendors and scored by evaluators at record speed.

COVID-19 has demonstrated that speed and efficiency are critical to meeting agency and constituent needs, and procurement teams have risen to the task. As Deloitte mentions, COVID-19 provides an opportunity to reexamine sourcing and procurement processes, making them faster and more agile, not only in emergencies but in normal times as well. As public agencies brace for the forecasted economic decline in the coming months and years, the ability to run more bids more efficiently sets up your agency to be faster, stronger, and more productive even amidst budget cuts and reprioritizations. 

Online procurement is here to stay

In our report, we found that 98% of procurement teams were working from home at some point in 2020. Additionally, 70% of procurement professionals adjusted their processes to run bid openings and meetings virtually, and 17% were planning to. 

To adapt to this new remote work environment, while also meeting the previously mentioned efficiency demands, procurement teams across North America have adopted digital procurement tools. In our survey of procurement professionals, only 10% responded that digital procurement platforms were not an important pillar of their business continuity plans. 25% said they were looking to implement a solution, and 65% said they were already using an online procurement platform.

This migration to digital tools is not a temporary trend, either. As procurement teams innovate to overcome supply shortages, award contracts within project deadlines, and stimulate local and national economies, the strategic role that procurement plays—particularly in times of crisis—has been brought into the spotlight. That’s why, when we asked procurement professionals if COVID-19’s effects have caused their organization to realize how vital digital procurement is to business continuity, 73% responded yes, and their organization will continue to make it a priority moving forward. Online procurement is here to stay because public agencies are recognizing procurement’s potential as a strategic partner. 

Evaluators expect more flexibility and convenience

Our State of Public Sourcing report also took a look at when people are completing their evaluations, comparing January/February to March/April of this year. 

In March/April, there was a considerably higher percentage of evaluation activity performed during non-office hours (i.e., outside 8 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday). Notably, the bars indicating work outside of office hours see a significant uptick before the beginning of every work day, meaning more evaluation activity has been happening from 6 am to 8 am since the start of remote work. More evaluations are also now happening on weekends, especially Sundays.

In January/February, 13% of evaluations were done outside of office hours. In March/April, 21% of evaluations were done outside of office hours. That’s a 62% increase in evaluations done outside 8 am to 5 pm, Monday to Friday. With so many government employees experiencing a breakdown of the barrier between work life and home life in 2020, this trend is not surprising.

This data serves as a reminder that offering evaluators flexibility and convenience in the evaluation process is more important than ever. This expectation isn’t going anywhere either; even as evaluators get back in the office, they still need to juggle their day job responsibilities with their role as an evaluator. Providing a digital tool that offers your evaluators the flexibility to complete their evaluations around other responsibilities and priorities is a surefire way to ensure a positive and engaging experience for all internal business partners. 

For more insights on how COVID-19 and remote work have become a catalyst for change in North American procurement, and how these lessons learned can prepare your team for procurement’s “next normal,” download your copy of The State of Public Sourcing: COVID-19 Edition.