Is implementing metrics to measure your procurement one of the items on your to-do list for 2019?

If so, we’re here to help you get started. In last week’s post, we covered the basics of procurement metrics: why you should track them, where to begin, and some key considerations to set you on the right track. Now, it’s time to select the metrics that make sense for your team and will help you advance towards key organizational goals this year. Here are some options to get you started. 

Procurement metrics for RFP Quality

First things first! If you’re looking to measure the quality of the RFPs you’re sending to market, these metrics offer a great place to start:

• How many amendments are asked?
• How many vendor questions are asked?
• How many times is your closing date extended?
• How many RFPs are cancelled after go-to-market?
• How many vendors responded?

Procurement metrics for service improvement

In public sector procurement, internal client satisfaction is among the most important measures of performance — just as important as supplier performance and cost savings, according to the Deloitte CPO Survey Report 2018. Here are some metrics to capture this:

• Speed of response to internal requests
• Project cycle times, from RFP inception to award (benchmark to establish a baseline for different types of solicitations)
• Vendor performance (measured via ongoing end user surveys/vendor report cards)
• Speed of response to Freedom of Information requests
• Client satisfaction Survey

Further reading: How State of Michigan uses Net Promoter Score (NPS) to measure internal client satisfaction

Procurement metrics for cost reduction

This can be a difficult metric to define, depending on your organization’s process, the types of projects you typically run, and the amount of historical detail you have. Some of the metrics which may be relevant include:

• Hard savings:
  • Purchase price that is lower than the previously delivered price
  • Dollar value of negotiated savings
  • Reduction in a planned contractual price increase
  • Price lower than the budget allocation (where no previous pricing history exists)
• Percentage of procurement spend under management
• Percentage of spend using cooperative contracts
• Procurement operating costs as a percentage of managed spend
• Number of sole source procurements

Procurement metrics for employee satisfaction

The talent gap in procurement is much-discussed, so it is good practice for teams to keep tabs on the happiness of their workforce. Some of the basic metrics for this include:

• Progress towards professional designations
• Hours of professional development training
• Employee retention
• Employee Net Promoter Score or other form of pulse survey

Final thoughts

For many procurement teams, it can be difficult to find the time for any non-essential reporting or measurement. However, getting some key metrics in place can help you save time in the long run by providing clarity on how your team is performing against your goals. With this knowledge, you can direct your resources in the most efficient way possible towards improvement.

Hear more about how public procurement teams can track and benchmark their procurement process in the State of the RFP Benchmarking Study Webinar.

The New Year heralds another set of predictions and priorities for the evolving procurement profession. Among the usual discussions of AI, millennials, and cybersecurity, one deceptively simple directive emerges: the need for procurement teams to measure and share their performance.

Measuring procurement performance is listed among the National Association of State Procurement Officials (NASPO) Top Ten Priorities for State Procurement. It’s also highlighted in SourceOne’s 2019 Procurement Predictions and outgoing Spend Matters editor Peter Smith’s article “Six Procurement Truths for the New Year.”

Why track procurement performance?

So, why is measurement considered a priority by procurement professionals at many prominent organizations?

The reasons are twofold: firstly, numbers are a powerful means to demonstrate procurement’s impact. Well-defined metrics can help tell the story of how procurement contributes to overarching organizational goals. As Smith notes, procurement needs to “demonstrate the value we can continue to add in a rapidly changing and digitising world.”

On the flipside, procurement metrics also help your team identify shortcomings and allocate the time and resources to improve these areas, fuelling better performance in the long run.

Defining goals

For public procurement teams, ‘a job well done’ is not as simple as hard dollar savings. Some of the other important metrics of success include:

• Customer Service
• Risk avoidance
• Transparency
• Employee retention

Before choosing any metrics, it’s valuable to ask yourself or your team “what does success mean?” Spend some time determining the key high level goals that your team seeks to accomplish. If this is new to your organization, NASPO’s Critical Success Areas for State Procurement offer a helpful jumping-off point.

Once accomplished, you can then select key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that advance those goals.
Taking time in this step helps you avoid ‘vanity metrics’ and ensures that the metrics you choose have a meaningful impact on the overall strategic goals of your organization.

Leading and lagging metrics

When it comes to KPIs, there are two types:

Lagging indicators: output-oriented, usually an outcome. 

Example: Client Satisfaction survey result

Leading indicators: input-oriented, usually an activity

Example: Adherence to agreed-upon project cycle times

Leading indicators help you to see how you’re tracking on an ongoing basis and make changes if necessary while there is still time to impact the lagging indicators. In the example above, this may involve ensuring that you adhere to agreed-upon project cycle times consistently, as this is likely to cause an increase in client satisfaction.

While lagging indicators may be your objective, leading indicators are a good way to ensure you are improving over time in order to positively impact the lagging indicator.

Need some ideas of what to track? See these Procurement Metrics to Start Tracking in 2019.

Putting the process in place

The next step is to implement a process for collecting and sharing these metrics.

Many procurement software solutions remove much of the manual work of collecting and analyzing your procurement data, providing KPIs in at-a-glance visual dashboards. If this is not possible, seek to devise a system for pulling and preparing metrics that is realistic given your team capacity.

The key to making metrics stick is consistency and visibility — ensure that you have a method for consistently sharing these metrics with your team or key stakeholders so they, too, take ownership in them and can adapt to continuously move the needle forward.

For many procurement teams, putting procurement metrics in place is an impactful step not only to improve your performance but also to share the story of how your team is helping the rest of the organization achieve their goals, too.  

Hear more about benchmarking your procurement performance in the State of the RFP Benchmarking Webinar.

ERPs are nearly ubiquitous in organizations. Common to the accounting and HR fields, they excel at the core transactional activities of a business. However, they often fall short when it comes to handling processes that require flexibility, adaptability, and collaboration.

Let’s face it — procurement is one of those processes that require flexibility and collaboration. Trying to conduct procurement through an ERP system such as Oracle or SAP Ariba can often feel like trying to ‘fit a square peg in a round hole.’ As a result, procurement teams often resort to conducting decisions outside the system via spreadsheets and email — leaving you with incomplete visibility over your spend, unsatisfied stakeholders, and inefficiencies in the process.

Modular eProcurement solutions provide a good alternative to address this challenge. Working alongside ERP systems, they provide a purpose-built software environment to manage the complexities of procurement, contract management, and supplier management. With an emphasis on ease-of-use and adaptability, modular solutions can be implemented quickly, require little to no training for stakeholders, and deliver a quick ROI — often within the first couple of projects.

In a recent ProcureCon webinar, Andrew Wolfe (Wolfe Procurement) and Cam Davies (Bonfire), tackled the topic of how procurement teams can employ modular eProcurement solutions to fill the gaps left by traditional ERPs.

From their discussion, here are the top three advantages of using an eProcurement tool alongside your ERP:

1. Procurement tools are flexible to different types of purchases or procurement strategies.

ERPs can easily handle simple quoting if you have incumbent suppliers from whom you need to request quotes according to pre-loaded parameters. However, they typically provide only one way of doing things from a procurement perspective.

Most organizations need a tool that covers a broad range of purchases and purchasing strategies. Modular eProcurement solutions offer that adaptability for teams and include purpose-built tools to manage the complexities of RFPs with multiple geographies, stakeholders, and suppliers.

2. Modular procurement tools facilitate easier stakeholder engagement.

In a transactional environment where all the buyers are centralized on one team, ERP procurement modules may fit the bill. However, that’s just not the reality for most teams. Especially when the goal of the department is to capture indirect spend, procurement activities are required to be highly collaborative, involving multiple stakeholders whose input is crucial to the success of the project.

Often, ERP procurement modules do not support stakeholder participation in the evaluation process. Even if they do, ERPs are notorious for a steep learning curve — and for occasional users that are in the system infrequently, it can be insurmountable to repeatedly re-learn how to use the system in order to participate.

“Once you train an evaluator, they may only be in the project for a week and then not use the system for another few months, which makes it very difficult as you’re constantly having to retrain your users,” explained Andrew Wolfe.  

Echoing this statement, 42% of procurement practitioners surveyed in the ProcureCon webinar reported that stakeholder engagement was a key challenge in their procurement function.

eProcurement solutions have the advantage of being extremely user-friendly, often requiring little to no training for stakeholders. Furthermore, the flexible set-up enables procurement teams to segment the evaluation to give stakeholders only the parts of proposals they need to evaluate.

The result is a smoother process for both evaluators and buyers. Your evaluators can get in and get their job done quickly, and you have a direct line of sight into where everyone is in the evaluation process, so you can easily manage the project and ensure evaluators have done their part.

3. eProcurement tools foster more innovation.

For companies that want to stay competitive in an ever-changing marketplace, procurement must be a partner in delivering innovation. But it’s hard to do that with a tool that does not adapt to your changing needs and challenges.

“When it comes to fostering innovation, this really comes down to looking for a tool that moves with your business,” explains Wolfe. “I find these SaaS based tools are constantly up-to-date not only with current technology but also with the way things are being done.”

eProcurement tools are purpose built; they’re specifically designed to support the procurement process, meaning they are built to help achieve your goals. As a result, you benefit from continuous improvements to the software as well as general adaptability to your needs — which helps you to deliver a competitive edge to your organization.

For more on how modular eProcurement platforms can address gaps left by your existing ERP, listen to the full webinar.

Once the difficult work of sourcing a supplier is completed, where does your contract go?

For all too many teams, it’s into a filing cabinet or a locally-stored spreadsheet, out of sight and out of mind. Without clear visibility over your active contracts, it’s difficult to keep on top of milestones and ensure contractual obligations are being met — let alone monitor performance or build vendor relationships.

Contract management is a key piece of the procurement puzzle. Here are three examples of how a proactive contract management process can benefit your organization.

Manage contract costs and changes

American City and County reports that the majority of contracted projects end up with schedule delays and cost overruns. A certain amount of change is to be expected — in fact, a study from National Association of State Procurement Officials indicates that a 20% increase in contracts is considered typical.  Nevertheless, it’s imperative for teams to be able to effectively track their contracts in order to ensure contractual agreements are being fulfilled and delays or changes are kept to a minimum.

Columnist Darin Matthews, director of procurement for University of California Santa Cruz, advises, “Stay involved with your contracts, even after award. Make sure you are not the last one to know about any changes or increases.”

In terms of metrics, he recommends tracking the awarded contract value vs. the final contract value, in order to be able to demonstrate the value your team is bringing to the organization.

Consolidate contracts for greater impact

With clear visibility into their contracts, public officials are able to proactively identify areas of overlap or inefficiency and maximize the impact of taxpayer dollars.

A good example of this in action is Seattle’s recent reform of their process for contracting homelessness services, as reported in Governing Magazine. The city worked with Government Performance Lab to drastically reform their contracting process for homelessness services, and the first step was consolidation of existing contracts.

Before embarking on this process, the city had more than 200 separate contracts with 60 providers for homelessness services — one provider had 18 separate contracts. Not only was this fragmented for the city, the lack of funding flexibility was an obstacle to service providers in efficiently supporting the needs of the populations they were trying to serve.

They consolidated 26 contracts held by five providers into eight contracts, offering more flexibility to providers and better value. This was an important step in kicking off a process of contracting reform, which included establishing performance metrics and instituting a results-oriented approach to their contract management.

Use data to promote better contract outcomes

With contract management streamlined, teams are able to more effectively use data to collect and improve delivery of their contracted services. This includes not only troubleshooting immediate concerns to keep contracts on track, but also working with contractors to share performance information and continuously improve performance.

As described in this Governing article, the contract management approach that works for some contracts are counterproductive in other types of contracts. For example social services contracts require a more active and continuous approach to move beyond simply checking compliance to be able to continually progress towards outcomes established for the target population.

Once contracts are centralized and the administrative steps streamlined, teams are able to adopt a more strategic approach to their contract management, such as performance-based contracting or results-driven contracting.

Learn more about how Bonfire’s Contract and Performance Management solution helps you stay on top of your active spend.

In a world where technology has continued to improve the way we communicate and gather feedback, why shouldn’t your vendor performance management be as simple and easy?

In brick-and-mortar businesses, wooden suggestion boxes have been replaced by online reviews or kiosks where customers can hit a ‘smiley-face’ button to signal their satisfaction. Businesses can solicit feedback from customers in a way that is convenient and simple for the customer (leading to better response rates) and prompted in the moment when their experience is top-of-mind (leading to more accurate responses). Rather than gathering dust in a box, feedback is collected in real-time, so managers can observe changes and intervene to correct negative trends.

This same approach can take your vendor performance management efforts from a bureaucratic check-box, to a source of valuable insight into contract health and performance trends. 

The case for more user-friendly vendor performance feedback methods

Vendor performance is just as important to procurement teams as customer experience is to restaurants: it can cost time, money, and internal client satisfaction.

However, many procurement teams simply don’t have the bandwidth to collect feedback on vendor performance—and if they do, the standard approach and tools can look suspiciously like the customer suggestion box: long, complicated surveys with low response rates, sent out manually and infrequently.

To be proactive and stay on top of their suppliers’ performance, procurement leaders need to have a finger on the pulse of their supplier poll. This requires a constant stream of data and information so you can determine trends and insights at a glance.

Technology can help you streamline and simplify your vendor performance management activities. Here are some of the reasons you need to evaluate the way you conduct your process:

• Getting to actionable conclusions faster. Vendor Performance Management solutions take care of the manual parts of soliciting vendor performance feedback (creating and sending surveys, collecting and aggregating responses), so procurement teams can maintain an up-to-date picture of their vendor performance without the tedious and time-consuming work.
• Intervening with performance issues before they become a problem. Frequent feedback gives procurement teams more visibility into the progression of contracts, allowing teams to zero in on performance issues before they impact the organization.
• No more pulling teeth to get survey responses. As many teams have learned from experience, getting contract owners to fill out vendor performance surveys can be a headache. Modern survey methods meet stakeholders where they already are—and in today’s world, that means mobile devices—and reap the rewards in their response rates.

See how Bonfire Vendor Performance Management helps you drive continuous improvement in your vendor relationships.

For busy procurement teams, benchmarking your RFP process is often the lowest item on the to-do list. With many teams facing growing project volumes and limited resources, it’s easy to see why.

When it comes to tracking your team’s performance, you don’t need spreadsheets of data to sort through. Instead, you need actionable insights that help you get your job done better and faster.

To help, we’ve pulled three key RFP benchmarks that you can start tracking against today, to improve your sourcing function tomorrow. To put these in perspectives, we’ve included relevant industry benchmarks from the State of the RFP, the most comprehensive RFP study ever conducted. Compiled from 6,600 RFP projects conducted through the Bonfire Strategic Sourcing Platform, this data gives you a unique window into how RFP spending decisions are conducted at 190 organizations across North America.

Use these as a starting point for smart, practical benchmarking that leads to better purchasing performance.

1) RFP Process Duration

When someone in your organization comes to you with a sourcing request, are you able to accurately forecast how long the procurement process might take?

Many teams have an anecdotal knowledge of how long certain types of projects take, but have not put in place a process to regularly track and review their RFP cycle times.

Why you should track this:

• Provide end users with an accurate assessment of how long it will take to procure their good/service, for better customer service and organizational planning.
• Track and identify patterns in project progress, for visibility into common bottlenecks and areas of improvement.
• More accurately allocate staffing resources to projects.

Industry benchmark:
According to the State of the RFP data, the average RFP process takes 56 days.

2) Vendor reach

Reaching a wide community of vendors is key to the success of a project, not only from a transparency standpoint by also a project competitiveness standpoint.

With most procurement teams using some form of electronic posting and submission, most teams have greater visibility into how many vendors are viewing their opportunities and how many go on to submit.

Why you should track this:

• More accurately predict and plan for the number of vendor submissions you can expect to receive.
• Ensure projects are sufficiently competitive and identify which types of projects are not reaching a wide community.
• Determine need and measure success of vendor outreach (e.g. reverse trade shows).

Industry benchmark:
The State of the RFP study finds that 33% of vendors who register to view project details go on to submit to the RFP opportunity.

The average project receives 4 vendor submissions.

3) Vendor Disqualification Rates

Disqualifications are a negative outcome for both vendors and procurement professionals, but there are a variety of reasons that they might occur. These include failure to provide a piece of mandatory qualifications, not meeting necessary certifications, conflicts of interest, or other factors. Tracking your disqualification rate helps you to gain visibility into why this might be happening.

Why you should track this:

• Identify recurring issues or patterns in the types of projects or proposals in which disqualifications are more frequent.
• Modify your submission process to decrease the incidence of disqualifications (e.g. teams have found that separating the proposal into several pieces of content rather than requiring all information in a single PDF reduces the incidence of incomplete responses).
• Identify the need for further vendor outreach or training to ensure vendors understand the process and avoid future disqualifications.

Industry benchmark:
According to the State of the RFP study, 11% of vendor proposals are disqualified. This has decreased slightly from 2015, when the disqualification rate was 17%.  

More RFP Insights

While far from an exhaustive list, these RFP benchmarks are an actionable place to start with tracking your own procurement performance.
For more RFP process benchmarks and best practices, view the State of the RFP Benchmarking Webinar On-Demand, with insights from:

• Omar Salaymeh, Director of Client Success at Bonfire; and
• Diane Horvath, Manager, Procurement Fairness and Advisory Services, BDO.  

Procurement professionals know that when it comes to RFP pricing, the lowest price isn’t everything. Nevertheless, the myth of price as a silver bullet persists.

Unlike their price-only counterparts like Requests for Quote or simple bids, RFP decisions balance technical requirements with pricing considerations to arrive at the best value proposal. However, procurement professionals still hear objections from stakeholders who dismiss the RFP as a bureaucratic vehicle for driving down prices, or vendors who seek to avoid them entirely.

To determine the truth of this oft-debated point, we turned to the data from over $4.4 billion in RFP decisions managed through the Bonfire eProcurement Platform. The State of the RFP Benchmarking Report provides a definitive — and surprising — answer.

The truth about RFP pricing

Across over 6,600 RFP decisions, the least expensive proposal won in only 10% of all projects. Conversely, the most expensive proposal won 2.9% of time.

This finding shows that while price is important, it is rarely the be-all-and-end-all that it is often assumed to be. Furthermore, the vast majority of the time, the winning proposal is neither the highest nor the lowest priced. Besides putting to rest an old myth, this finding carries important implications for procurement teams.

Clear specifications help vendors price RFPs right

Unstructured or unclear RFPs make it difficult for vendors to put forth their best proposal, and also for buyers to make apples-to-apples comparison to determine the best value for their organization.

The research shows that most RFP decisions are not hinging on price alone, but rather a nuanced combination of technical and pricing considerations. As a result, it is imperative for vendors to have enough information to develop their proposal and pricing accurately. The more assumptions that your vendors have to make in order to answer your RFP, the greater the risk that they will:

• Submit low-priced minimal bids that will need to be upgraded later at additional cost;
• Submit high-priced bids to cover their risk;
• Choose not to bid because it’s not clear whether they will be able to make profit.

Very clear specifications make it possible for vendors to make their pricing decisions with a higher degree of accuracy, leading to a better process for them and a better outcome for you.

Defensible RFP decisions are key

Another important takeaway is the imperative for teams to ensure their RFP decisions are well-justified. In today’s climate, procurement is under great scrutiny to follow a fair process and provide value. With the majority of bids not being awarded to the lowest price, it is important for teams to be able to justify this decision.

Procurement teams must be able to demonstrate that they have performed a detailed review of each proposal’s strengths in context of their respective prices and found the higher priced offer to provide better value. A thorough RFP evaluation process is key to ensure that you have confidence in the scores and selection. Meanwhile, thorough documentation ensures that you can adequately justify the decision after the fact, in the event of vendor debriefs, bid protests, or internal audits.

More RFP questions, answered

RFPs provide structure to manage complexity and ensure a level playing field in some of the world’s most important spending decisions. However, they are often conducted behind closed doors. The State of the RFP uncovers industry benchmarks for RFP set-up, RFP pricing, evaluation, and outcomes, dispel common myths and shed light on the best practices of leading procurement teams.
For more answers to your RFP questions, view the State of the RFP Benchmarking webinar-on-demand. 

Managing the RFP evaluation is one of the most difficult parts of any RFP process. From coordinating everyone’s schedules for meetings, to facilitating an award decision that everyone can agree on, there’s no shortage of challenges.

In spite of this, procurement professionals have few benchmarks into how the process is handled at other organizations. To shed some light on a process that (by necessity) takes place behind closed doors, we analyzed the data from $4.4 billion in RFP decisions conducted through the Bonfire Strategic Sourcing Platform.

This research, from the State of the RFP Report, provides insight into how 190 organizations across North America manage their most important spending decisions.

Use these benchmarks as a jumping-off point to reflect on how your team can manage this challenging process more effectively.

The average RFP evaluation committee consists of 4.4 members

A successful outcome from your RFP decision depends on the expertise of your evaluation committee, which could include subject matter experts, end users, member of peripheral departments, or even community members.

The report shows that the average RFP project includes 4.4 evaluators. However, there’s really no one-size-fits-all answer for how big your evaluation group should be. Ultimately it depends on how widely the decision will impact the organization and whose expertise is crucial to the decision.

Many teams would like to include more diverse perspectives (e.g. including community members’ feedback in social services decisions), but find themselves hampered by a cumbersome process. To ensure the procurement process is not a limiting factor on your evaluation committee size, consider ways to reduce the administrative workload of including more evaluators. Bringing the evaluation process online is among the most impactful steps you can take to include more evaluators without an exponential increase in photocopying and other manual work.

27% of evaluator scoring happens outside of work hours

Evaluators are typically busy people with many competing priorities — and as a result, they occasionally procrastinate on their evaluation duties.

The State of the RFP report shows that the average evaluation period is 37 days in duration — however, 53% of scores are recorded in the last 7 days before the deadline, and 10% of scores are recorded on the last day before the deadline. For people with a lot on their plate, it’s no surprise that scoring often gets pushed off to the last days before the deadline. However, with 27% of scoring recorded outside of normal business hours, this data hints that evaluators are struggling to get their scoring done within their work hours.

Given this, procurement teams should seek to make it as easy as possible for evaluators to participate productively in the RFP process.

35% of RFP proposal scores lacked consensus

Once the scores are in, the hard part begins. This is where your skills as a procurement professional really shine, as you work to understand areas of disagreement, build consensus, and ultimately come to a mutually agreeable decision.

The report data shows that a surprising 35% of all proposal scores lacked consensus among the evaluation committee. (Lack of consensus was defined as an instance where any two evaluators’ scores for a given criterion on a given supplier differed by 30% or more). A further 41% of scores featured soft consensus. Only 21% of scores featured a hard consensus.

Lack of consensus is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’ — but it certainly can slow down an evaluation process.  To ensure effective resolution, procurement professionals should focus the meeting around outlier scores or areas of significant disagreement, and avoid line-by-line reviews of scores that are in agreement. Attention should also be given to thorough documentation of the decision, so that in vendor debriefs, bid protest, or audits, the decision is well-justified and defensible.

As with any benchmark, these stats are not intended to provide a prescriptive target for your team to hit, but rather to put your process into a larger context and surface ways that your own process could be enhanced for greater effectiveness and more value.

For more insights from our study on RFP processes and outcomes, watch the State of the RFP Benchmarking webinar on-demand.

We’re sitting down with procurement professionals in different organizations to hear about how they approach their work, how Bonfire fits into their day-to-day, and the resources and tools that keep them on track.

This month’s guest is Amy Tejirian, Procurement Officer at BCNET. Amy collaborates with BCNET’s 25 member colleges, universities, and research institutes across British Columbia on a diverse range of sourcing projects. Needless to say, she gets things done! Here’s more on how she does it.

Tell me a bit about your role, and how you got there?

I’m the procurement officer here, so I’m involved with anything to do with procurement. We’re a collaborative sourcing organization, and my role involves working together with the 25 different colleges and institutions in BC on procurement. Each of them is very unique—we work with different types of institutions, in different locations.

Once an opportunity has been identified, I start off by engaging with the working group on what they’re looking for, and what kind of procurement it will be. I work closely with them to facilitate the evaluation, and then once there is a successful proponent, I will engage in negotiations and draft the contracts.

I’ve been here for a little over a year. Prior to that, I drafted and negotiated contracts for Vancouver Coastal Health. Before that, I was a contracts lawyer in Florida’s Department of Health for ten years.

What do you like about procurement?

I like working in groups and hearing what each different person brings to the table. Everyone on an evaluation committee has different expertise and experience.

I also enjoy that when you’re doing procurements, you become a mini-expert on all of these specific topics. We’re procuring a broad range of goods and services, and it’s never the same thing twice. All of a sudden, now I know so much about things I would never have known about otherwise, like elevator maintenance and computer networking and custodial supplies. I like that aspect of it.

Take me through a typical day.

There’s no typical day—it changes day-to-day depending on what projects are on the go and which stage I am at in the procurement.

Usually there are many projects going on at once. For one project I might be at the drafting stage, for another it could be pre-evaluation workshop, and for others I’ll be in contract negotiations.

With so many projects on the go in different stages, how do you keep track of it all?

I write everything down in meetings, or my co-op student helps me with that. I’m taking notes a lot, so I review those every day and refresh where I’m at in my to-do list, what’s next, and what has the soonest deadline and needs to take priority.

How does Bonfire fit into your day?

I use it on a daily basis—I’m a power user.

In the posting phase, I can see who’s pulling up the documents and see the vendor Question and Answer. In the evaluation phase, I can check to see the progress of the evaluation groups, the discrepancies in scores. Today we’re having an evaluation meeting, and we’ll use it to go over their comments.

I also use the reports when I’m compiling recommendation reports.

How is the process different now as opposed to before you used Bonfire?

Prior to using Bonfire, it was all done by paper submission. People would have to arrive to submit by 4 o’clock, and you’d see people running to get there on time. And then all the paper! One project could have boxes and boxes of binders if you’re asking for multiple copies of proposals.

I like that everything is received electronically and scored electronically in the same place: the NDA, the conflict of interest, and all the documents. It’s great for record-keeping. I don’t have to have a hundred Excel worksheets. Everything is all there.

How does Bonfire help facilitate collaboration?

We have working group members from across the province. It’s easy to share proposals with the working group, because they can access them through Bonfire. Previously it would require either taking the documents to evaluators physically or having a courier take them. Then you had the added worry about them disposing of the documents or returning them.

During the evaluation meeting, it’s all on Bonfire. We pull it up, go over the comments, and discuss any discrepancies. If the evaluators need to adjust their scores, they also have their Bonfire account open, and they have the opportunity to do that in real-time so the score updates immediately.

As a Bonfire power user, working on the platform every day, how have you found the support from Bonfire team?

The Bonfire support is very responsive.

Another thing we noticed after attending the BC User Meetup is that Bonfire is open to user experience and how to improve it. It’s nice to know that a platform is listening to the people that use it every day.

What resources/websites/publications do you follow for industry info?

There are two organizations I follow: The Procurement Office with Paul Emanuelli, and The Procurement School with Maureen Sullivan.

They’re on top of procurement changes, and they offer good procurement webinars and seminars.

In your experience, what are the key skills for procurement professionals?

To listen to what the working group and what the organization really needs and wants.

They’re relying on you to facilitate the process so that they get the goods and services that they need: to facilitate their discussion, help them move forward if they’re at a standstill, and be a guide through the process.

What is some advice you have to offer for a career in procurement?

Don’t take anything personally. During negotiations or difficult parts of the processes, remember it’s not about you. Focus on the process.

In the legal field, a lot of things are very adversarial, but procurement is not like that. You’re working towards a mutually beneficial agreement. In the end, you want to be on the same page.

Read more stories of real procurement teams using Bonfire. 

For public procurement teams, strong stakeholder relationships are not a nice-to-have or an afterthought. They are at the core of your ability to drive value for your organization. In fact, in Deloitte’s 2018 CPO Survey, public sector procurement leaders identified ‘internal client satisfaction’ as a priority of equal importance to supplier performance.

With this in mind, the best eProcurement platforms go beyond unlocking efficiency for the procurement team; they also deliver enhancements to your stakeholder relationships internally and externally.

This was a key theme that emerged from our webinar discussion The Challenges of Supplier Selection in Transit Sourcing, with special guest Michael Brinton, Principal, Contracts Manager at the Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

Facing growing project volumes, his team implemented Bonfire’s eProcurement platform to bring their time-consuming paper and manual RFx process online. Their team realized significant efficiency gains (which were the subject of a Bonfire Case Study).

However, the impact of their successful implementation extends beyond efficiency. They have also seen improvements in the way that the procurement team is perceived by stakeholders within and outside the organization.

Laying the foundation for a strong business relationship

The procurement process is often the first interaction between an organization and a supplier, setting the tone for the business relationship to follow. When you think about it that way, it’s clear that the method through which you engage suppliers is an important first impression.

Michael Brinton and his team were well aware of the impact their former paper processes might have on the supplier community. Paper submissions present obstacles to suppliers, from the cost and inconvenience of printing and preparing paper copies, to the time required to deliver the bids before the dropbox closes.

But there was another risk to relying on a paper process.

“You want to be an attractive business partner for the consultant community,” explains Brinton. “If you’re still conducting your operations in a method that is 20 to 30 years old while the rest of the community is moving to mobile or cloud-based applications, you can make yourself a hurdle to do business with, because you’re dated.”

In their search for eProcurement software, Brinton and his team sought a platform that represented their organization the way they wanted to be perceived by suppliers: professional and modern. To ensure this, they not only considered the software’s functionality but also how it looked and felt from a user’s perspective.

The result has been “universal positive acceptance” from suppliers, according to Brinton. The seamless digital submission process offers convenience, clarity, and ease to bidding suppliers, setting a positive tone for the business relationship.

Developing trust internally

Every organization has tech enthusiasts, the early adopters who are the first to try out every new app on the market. On the other side of the spectrum are those who are resistant to change and skeptical of the value of technology.

It’s easy to get the first group excited about eProcurement, but much more difficult to sway the latter group. However, Brinton and his team have found that prioritizing an intuitive user experience in their eProcurement software selection has ensured that even the reluctant adopters are now big proponents of the system.

“Psychologically, both for our team and for the rest of the staff, it makes people feel good when they can use a tool that works the way it is supposed to, that looks good, has a good user interface, and that your business partners like.”

A modern eProcurement platform provides structure and simplicity for evaluators and other internal stakeholders, fostering a positive working relationship with procurement departments, and instilling trust and confidence in the agency’s procurement process.

Launching point for further innovation

The smooth adoption and tremendous efficiency improvements following MTC’s implementation of eProcurement software have given the procurement team the ability to pursue other forward-looking process improvements. For example, they have since introduced e-signatures and transitioned their public bid openings to video conferencing.

“Across the board, it has raised the status of our contracts group throughout the agency, and it has put us in the position to lead other efforts of electronic efficiency that are going to have an impact agency-wide.”

Now, the MTC procurement team is preparing to roll out a workflow system to completely eliminate all paper in their procurement and contracting process. They are frequently consulted by local agencies looking to launch similar initiatives at their own organizations. And it all started with the successful implementation of eProcurement, which opened the door for further ambitious projects.

As Brinton reflects, “Taking one small step towards change can really open the door to new things.”