Month: March 2022

At Bonfire, we get to work with hundreds of public procurement professionals every day. Our platform connects you to tools and resources that make your jobs easier. But we also do our best to connect you to each other, so you can reap the benefits of working together.

On March 15, we brought together procurement professionals from crown corporations across Canada for a virtual roundtable discussion. Participants heard from industry experts, shared best practices, and forged new connections with their peers.

If you missed the event, don’t worry! In this post, we’re rounding up all the highlights, so you can put some of the big themes and takeaways from our conversation to use.

What general policies do crown corporations follow when it comes to procurement, POs, and contracts?

Crown corporations purchase a variety of goods and services, from professional services to technology to general goods. Roundtable participants said under a certain threshold (around $100K for services and $25K for goods) their client departments have full discretion on how to source. If the amount is over the threshold, sourcing is led by the procurement team, whether through a public bid, NOI, or limited tendering option.

Most agencies require a purchase order (PO) for almost every purchase in order to issue payment. A small minority of purchases can be governed by PO terms but, in most instances, a supporting contract needs to be executed prior to the PO being created. Depending on the purchase, contract lengths are generally 3-5 years with the option for renewal.

How are crown corporations in Canada levelling up their procurement practices?

For the most part, the folks who attended our roundtable said their organizations use an assortment of disconnected systems and tools for different parts of the procurement process. Going forward, the agencies that use a patchwork approach are working towards adopting a single tool that will streamline their processes and support procurement success.

Bonfire allows them to bring every stage of the procurement lifecycle into a central platform where the procurement team and relevant stakeholders can collaborate on RFPs and evaluations with full visibility into the process. eProcurement is appealing because it can help agencies move the needle on strategic goals, including project efficiency, stakeholder collaboration, and vendor engagement.

What strategies are crown corporations using to deal with the current price uncertainty in the market?

Inflation is a real concern for public sector budgets today. When we asked participants how they’re approaching price uncertainty, they spoke about the importance of system portability. With prices for cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) subscriptions fluctuating relative to the market, it’s important to make sure you can stay on top of fees and look for alternatives as required.

We also discussed the strategy of reverse auctions in which suppliers compete to offer the lowest price possible. Vendors can see each other’s pricing (usually in real time) and try to beat those bids by going lower. The end goal is to drive purchase prices down for the buyer. In Canada, procurement professionals are hesitant to use this method, although they recognize that it could be a useful tool for certain types of projects. Overall, participants worried about getting overly involved in price, since it could negatively impact relationships with vendors.

How important is planning to procurement project success?

According to Canadian procurement lawyer Paul Emanuelli, 95% of project failures are caused by poor project planning. With that in mind, roundtable participants talked about how the early steps of a project impact their overall procurement outcomes.

Participants agreed that shortchanging the planning stage of the procurement process ultimately leads to problems downstream. Not only does poor research and requirements gathering create bottlenecks, it also leaves the outcome to chance and makes it difficult to determine if project objectives have been met.

While it can be difficult to get business owners to spend the time upfront on the planning process, ultimately, this approach saves time and mitigates risk down the line. Proper planning allows clients to achieve their goals within their timeline, ensures agencies allocate the right internal resources to support projects, and enables vendors to meet client expectations. On top of that, a thorough approach to planning minimizes change requests and cost overruns, while making sure potential risks are identified and transferred, mitigated, or absorbed appropriately.

How are organizations promoting diversity and sustainability in their purchasing strategies?

Vendor diversity and sustainability are becoming increasingly important for procurement teams. For many of our roundtable participants, this focus is being driven by organization-wide mandates. Folks shared how their teams are doubling down on these priorities, including:

• Engaging consultants
• Developing policies and strategies
• Creating guidelines and tools (e.g., tip sheet for low-value purchases)
• Enhancing RFPs (e.g., opportunity identification worksheet, clause menu, evaluation criteria)
• Conducting pilots (e.g., starting with high-impact RFPs with eventual rollout to all RFPs)
• Providing training for staff and internal clients
• Recruiting a dedicated resource to focus on social purpose and sustainable procurement

As part of their approach, agencies are including new types of social, economic, and environmental sustainability criteria in their evaluation grids. They are aligning evaluations to policy areas, such as environmental impacts, social impacts, and Indigenous reconciliation.

Of course, increasing vendor diversity involves contracting with new suppliers, which comes with its own set of challenges. Participants shared that factors like due diligence, manual processes, and compliance reviews all create bottlenecks in the process. eProcurement can help resolve many of these issues and improve vendor engagement by automating tasks, keeping processes transparent, and supporting 100% compliance.

What Canadian-specific procurement resources do you use?

To close out the session, participants let us in on their go-to sources for public procurement best practices, industry news, and support, including:

• Networking with other Canadian procurement professionals
• Webinars and resources from Canadian procurement law firms like Paul Emmanuelli’s
• Provincial and federal government resources
• International procurement websites that cover issues faced in Canadian procurement

Be part of the community

Are you ready to discover more support from your public procurement community? Join Bonfire’s Open Access Community Projects today to continue leveraging your peers’ insights through free RFP templates and project planning resources. 

Today I’m proud to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of Bonfire and, with it, the incredible clients and team who have made our success possible. To mark the occasion, I’m hopping onto the blog to reflect on our journey — to think about how far we’ve come and where we’re headed.

Reflecting on the journey

When I joined Bonfire over 9 years ago, we were a small startup with a handful of clients. Coming from the vendor side, I knew our eProcurement platform had the potential to transform sourcing and purchasing in the public sector. But I could never have known just how successful Bonfire would be.

Before joining the team, I was a consulting engineer for a small firm and part of my job was submitting RFX responses to the public sector. That’s right, I was on the vendor side! The very last project I worked on really opened my eyes to the promise of eProcurement. It was a proposal for one of Canada’s largest hospitals — and it was a monstrosity. We were one of 30 consultants that responded, and our paperwork alone filled a banker’s box. Not only was it arduous to compile, but it also had to be stored under lock and key. I don’t envy the evaluators who had to manually sift through thousands of pages. It would be months before we got the results and by then we had turned down several opportunities to avoid overextending our team.

You can see why I immediately understood the value of Bonfire. I knew eProcurement would give vendors and public agencies the tools they needed — easy submissions, quick evaluations, instant award notifications, and transparent results — to build strong and lasting relationships.

Fast-forward 10 years and Bonfire’s eProcurement platform has streamlined the process for 451,506 global users (and counting), including buyers, vendors, and evaluators. Our clients have run 81,900 projects on Bonfire and vendors have uploaded nearly 150 million pages of proposal documents. In that time, we’ve never stopped evolving to respond to the changing landscape of public procurement.

Collaborating to find a way

Regardless of the curveballs we’ve been thrown over the years (yes, including a pandemic), our team and clients continue to evolve, innovate, and prove our value, again and again. If there’s one thing that’s true of both the Bonfire team and the public procurement professionals we work with, it’s that we always find a way.

Nearly 700 clients have collaborated with us over the last decade to help make Bonfire what it is today. We’ve co-created a purpose-built solution that rises to the needs of public sector procurement. But beyond that, we’ve also worked together to support the success of public procurement professionals everywhere. Whether through our Open Community Projects, Inside Public Procurement podcast, Strategic Sourcing blog, or virtual events and user meet-ups, we’re dedicated to building a community that promotes and celebrates excellence in public procurement.

Driving impact with eProcurement

As we enter our tenth year, we’re emerging out of a global pandemic truly ready for anything. Given the impact our solution has had during Covid-19 — connecting citizens to essential vaccines, PPE, cleaning supplies, and more — our mission and vision are truer than ever. The pandemic was an extreme challenge for procurement agencies, but it also brought procurement into focus. For once, everyone knew the procurement minister’s name! And the general public quickly came to witness the essential role procurement professionals play in keeping our communities safe, healthy, and functioning.

I always say that we’re lucky to work in the public procurement space because the delta between our day-to-day efforts and the impact they have is very small. We clearly see the positive difference our product makes in the world — from supplying healthcare workers with PPE to providing laptops for home-schooled children. Seeing that real-world impact keeps us motivated to continue supporting procurement teams for years to come.

What’s next?

When people ask me what the future holds for procurement, I think about what happens as more and more agencies digitize at scale. What happens is that procurement rises to be a value-add department within the agency. And procurement departments become guardians of the process — not just from a compliance point of view, but from a strategic point of view. Internal clients will want to engage procurement teams not only to ensure compliance, but also because they provide deep expertise on how to source the best products and services at the best value.

Bonfire eProcurement supports that strategic role for hundreds of public sector agencies that rely on us to manage their competitive bid processes. Looking to the next 10 years and beyond, we’ll continue to provide a platform to elevate procurement’s importance and enable strategic decision-making. I’m very proud of that legacy and I know Bonfire will continue to be a strong partner for many years to come.

Celebrating our clients

We wouldn’t be here without the clients who have made our success possible. So, to celebrate our 10-year anniversary, we’re launching a new awards ceremony. Bonfire’s Procurement Awards celebrates procurement professionals who excel, innovate, and showcase excellence in the eProcurement space. I encourage you to nominate someone who inspires you.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us over the past 10 years. I look forward to working together to shape the future of public procurement.