Grants management and procurement work hand-in-hand, especially in times of disruption, like the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, compliance is the cornerstone of grants management, and procurement can ensure that rules are followed from pre-award to closeout. And coordinating acquiring and spending of funds using digital tools can make a big impact in your organization.

That’s why we recently teamed up with grants management leader eCivis in our latest webinar “3 ways to maximize your COVID-19 funding through digital transformation.” Our expert panelists discussed the Coronavirus Relief Fund (CRF), which helps to cover expenses related to COVID-19, like medical and public health goods and services. For many, acquiring and spending CRF compliantly and with maximum impact, all before the December 30 deadline, can be daunting—but it doesn’t have to be. Our hosts discussed 3 steps to maximizing CRF dollars, and they were even joined by Nolan Sosa from the City of San Angelo to give an inside peek at how his agency used CRF to buy procurement software to maintain social distancing and remote work collaboration. Here are some highlights from that conversation.

Step 1: Finding the funding

It’s no secret that tracking down the right grant opportunities is time-consuming and overwhelming. Simply reading the fine print in a notice of opportunity can take hours. Digital tools can help standardize and track everything. Customizable search engines, for instance, consolidate the most important information so you can know if the opportunity is relevant before you read all the fine print.

In the webinar, Nolan shared his experience with finding COVID-19 funding and determining if he had a case to use it to digitize their procurement processes.

“What no one tells you about a pandemic is that infrastructure projects and health and public safety priorities do not stop when the world goes into lockdown,” said Nolan. The procurement process had to continue, but now with the added challenge of accepting and evaluating projects remotely in a way that complied with all applicable statutes and laws. Not to mention, vendors were frustrated because their bids were not arriving on time due to mail delays. 

“eProcurement was no longer a want for us; it became a need very quickly,” said Nolan.

With very little budget to work with, Nolan began looking into grant options like CRF. He was able to build a business case predicated on two factors:

1. Social distancing – Online bid submission could eliminate the need for in-person proposal submissions, courier deliveries, and physical bid openings.

2. Remote workforce – With Nolan’s team working from home, eProcurement could help with collaboration, communication, and complete coverage of the process online.

With his business case built, Nolan was able to get buy-in and approval from the City Attorney, CFO, and City Manager.

Step 2: Applying the funding to missions

Every public agency has a mission—and the way you choose to use your funding at this time can either work towards it or against it.

For instance, in an effort to reduce costs in the current economic climate, some agencies may choose to cut some of their software costs. But eliminating cloud-based systems can introduce redundancies and a lot of human error, ultimately affecting your mission’s impact long-term. 

By digitizing procurement, Nolan’s team was able to realize efficiencies that enabled his agency to meet constituents’ needs faster. For instance, they’ve been able to increase the level of service for internal clients with Bonfire’s intake module, streamline the drafting process with templates, and focus less on vendor document management and more on vendor engagement with a portal where suppliers can upload their own documents and proposals. 

Step 3: Multiplying funding to maximize outcomes

With so many agencies still facing budget cuts, staff reductions, and being forced to do more with less, being able to make your funding go further to maximize outcomes for your mission is more critical than ever. Digitizing your grants and procurement processes can help.

“When you take time away from paper shuffling and administrative duties, and allocate it towards long-term sustainable sourcing solutions, you’re serving your organization and you’re serving the public in a more effective manner. And if you’re able to do it through state and federal dollars, then that’s just an added bonus,” said Nolan.

To listen to the full conversation with our expert panelists on how to find and effectively spend COVID-19 funding, watch the full webinar for free. Although for some agencies, like public housing and transportation, the deadline has been extended, the deadline for states to spend CRF is still December 30—which is approaching fast. Book a demo with us to learn more about maximizing your CRF or other COVID-19 funding with procurement software. 

Whether you’re trying to streamline manual RFP processes or accept vendor submissions while working from home, eBidding tools can help—but not every solution is created equal.

As public sector agencies across North America face tightening budgets and a renewed focus on cost savings to respond to the economic climate caused by COVID-19, free bid management software appears, at first glance, like an ideal solution. 

But as a procurement professional, you know that “free” or “cheap” don’t always mean “best value.” That’s because costs need to be cut somewhere. Sometimes the costs are borne by vendors or a company that wants to buy your data, or the eBidding supplier cuts services like client support or product updates.

Like anything else that’s free, you get what you pay for. But unlike a free Spotify account or a sample at Costco (remember those?), free bid management software can negatively impact your relationships with your vendors, or even put your organization at significant legal risk. Here are three reasons to forgo free, and instead invest in an eBidding solution that has you and your agency’s best interests at heart.

Don’t punish your vendors by making them pay

Many free bid management software solutions require vendors to pay to submit their bid and to view and download all RFP documents and details. But hiding opportunities behind a paywall hurts your vendors’ bottom line. In the end, it forces vendors to increase their prices and fees, so you’re paying one way or another.

Not to mention, these costs force vendors to be more selective, meaning your opportunities will get fewer views, fewer bids, and you will ultimately pay higher prices due to lack of competition.

Most of all, vendor-paid software models make it harder for Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBEs) and small businesses in your own backyard to bid, causing you to miss out on opportunities to significantly support your local economy.

Free bid management software isn’t worth the legal risk

Another way bid management solutions can offer their software for free is by selling your data to third parties. This isn’t like authorizing access to your personal data when signing up for a Facebook account; there are significant legal ramifications for giving up ownership of data in any business setting, especially as a public sector agency. That’s why your IT department likely doesn’t endorse free software.

Even if you own the data and what happens to it, free bid management software can still put your agency at risk by cutting corners when it comes to privacy and security. These tools may not get a lot of security updates, or they may cause instability to your systems or network. All it takes is one lawsuit or security breach to make that bid management solution suddenly not-so-free. 

Free bid management software doesn’t owe you anything (and that’s a problem)

Unfortunately, lots of free bid management software solutions cut costs by erasing any professional resources that help ensure success through implementation and beyond, like timely product support or a dedicated client success manager. In fact, you don’t get a whole lot of say into how the eBidding supplier operates, because you’re not the one generating revenue.

The result is often a frustrating experience for your internal stakeholders and vendors. Your bids portal is effectively your organization’s digital front lobby—do you want people jumping through hoops to do business with you? Do you want your implementation to fail because of a confusing user experience? Likely not.

So free bid management software likely isn’t going to meet your agency’s eBidding needs—what can you do? How do you move forward if you don’t have the budget to invest in best-value eBidding software? 

Public agencies have a unique opportunity right now to use their CARES Act or other COVID-19 funding to invest in procurement software. In fact, agencies across North America are using their COVID-19 funding to not only invest in eBidding software for this year, but for years to come. Time is running out though—the deadline to spend CARES Act funding is December 30. We recently teamed up with grants management leader eCivis to bring you the definitive guide on everything you need to know about finding CARES and other COVID-19 funding, applying the funding to your missions, and multiplying the funding to maximize outcomes. Download your copy of our latest eBook to get started.

For procurement teams, a standardized and collaborative intake process often gets pushed to the back burner when you’re constantly reacting to the urgent and unforeseen needs of your internal clients. Your procurement intake process, however, has the potential to make or break any project.

Take the 95/5 rule, for instance. According to procurement lawyer Paul Emanuelli, 95% of procurement failures are caused by the negligence to properly address the five core elements of project planning:

• Scoping of requirements (What are we buying?)
• Pricing structures (What is the pricing format?)
• Evaluation of criteria (What is the evaluation plan?)
• Contract format (How do we assemble the final contract?)
• Tendering format (What is the tendering format?)

To secure better bid and RFP outcomes, procurement can add a lot of strategic value when brought into the beginning planning stages of a project. A standardized and collaborative request intake process is key. Digital tools have the power to simplify your procurement processes and connect your colleagues to your procurement systems so everyone is on the same page, driving outcomes that benefit your procurement team, your internal clients, and your leadership. Here’s how.

How intake empowers your procurement team

When requests and questions are coming in the form of forwarded email chains, it can feel like you’re trying to fix the car when it’s already driving down the road. 

An online procurement intake process can help you get requirements right the first time and set expectations when it comes to things like vendor requirements and timelines. Digital tools that are quick, easy, and get requestors back to their day jobs ensure that your process is actually adopted by your colleagues. 

Connecting your intake process directly to your eProcurement software can help eliminate manual data entry and give your team a real-time view into project pipeline, which makes it easier to organize and triage your team’s workload. When your team comes together to plan, it’s fast and efficient to review new and open requests, update details and assignments, and make sure you hit deadlines, all online.

When your procurement team is better aligned and seamlessly communicating, it translates to better collaboration with your internal clients, too. 

How intake empowers your colleagues

Implementing a user-friendly request intake process can help uncover real business need early so procurement can deliver great value at a competitive price—making everyone happy and building trust in procurement’s strategic contribution. 

By providing your internal clients with templates, best practices, and realistic expectations, you can help lighten the load for them. Bring industry bid and RFP data to your planning meetings so that you can assure your stakeholders that you’ve got this. You can help everyone better understand the category, how other agencies have done similar projects, and what to expect with this project when it comes to timelines, criteria weighting, vendor participation, and the types of information you need from vendors.

The result of this supercharged collaboration and alignment is a faster event cycle, which, at the end of the day, is what your internal clients have wanted all along.

How intake empowers your agency

When procurement is equipped with the information you need to make the most informed and cost-effective bid or RFP decisions, your agency can reallocate that saved time and money to more initiatives and programs that benefit your constituents.

As a procurement team, you can enable your agency to steward taxpayer dollars with more impact by giving senior managers visibility into your intake request dashboard, providing them with insight into where and when departments are planning on spending their budget. This insight helps your organization forecast the procurement pipeline and allocate resources to meet demand.

You can bring your agency’s budget to life even further by providing additional insight with national and local competitive event data. With industry data in hand, procurement can enable smarter budgeting for your agency, positioning procurement as a strategic advisor. 

Want to dive deeper into what an online, collaborative intake process looks like, and how it can add significant value for everyone at your organization? Download our intake eBook to learn more.

December 30 is fast-approaching, and with it, the deadline to spend your CARES Act funding. 

According to the House Committee on Ways and Means, state and local governments have received roughly over $765 billion in federal coronavirus funding. As of August 2020, however, state and local governments have only spent 25% of their funding.

We get it—keeping your head above water while responding to the new and emerging needs of your constituents is hard enough, and trying to get a bird’s eye view on how to use your funding in the most effective way possible is no easy task, especially under such a tight timeline. However, you could be leaving funds on the table that could help you invest in tools that will offset some budget pressures that are expected to emerge in 2021. The time to act on your CARES funding is now.

During the early days of the pandemic, many public agency CFO offices turned to their procurement function as a critical area to focus CARES funding to keep essential goods and services flowing to their respective towns, cities, schools, and constituents while most had shifted to a remote work environment. And today, 7 months into the pandemic, procurement technology continues to be an area where public institutions are directing CARES funding to help drive maximum ROI on these funds, all while easing COVID-19-related challenges that your agencies and citizens are facing. 

Get the most out of your CARES funding by pandemic-proofing your procurement process 

According to guidance by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, eligible expenditure for reimbursement under the CARES Act is any “COVID-19-related expenses reasonably necessary to the function of government that satisfy the Fund’s eligibility criteria.”

So does procurement software qualify? Absolutely! 

Investing your CARES dollars in a sourcing software solution (like Bonfire) can serve as a force multiplier, driving greater impact even with limited resources so that you can get goods and services to your constituents quickly and compliantly. The right digital tools can empower procurement teams to reduce costs and drive the best value in bids and RFx for their agency by streamlining manual tasks, increasing vendor competition, and fostering stakeholder collaboration.

In fact, 73% of organizations are prioritizing digital procurement to enable business continuity while working remotely. That’s because agencies are seeking digital transformation to handle new and unique challenges due to COVID-19. Competitive events need to be efficient while maintaining compliance, which is why the average RFP requires 15% fewer evaluators. 21% of evaluations are done outside of office hours, a 62% increase from before COVID-19, meaning evaluators expect more flexibility and convenience than ever before. 

Academic institutions in particular saw a dramatic change as they prepared for virtual, physical, or hybrid classrooms in August and September. An analysis of our own database found that schools have seen a 367% increase in cleaning and disinfecting solution projects, a 122% increase in tablets and computer projects, and a 183% increase in cybersecurity software and equipment projects. 

In addition to all these new challenges, state and local governments are still bracing for the economic fallout predicted for the rest of 2020/2021. As a result, procurement departments are being tasked with doing more with less—less budget and less headcount. For agencies continuing to run their processes over paper and email, finding opportunities to cut costs and drive value amidst resource constraints presents a huge challenge.

Texans Can Academies brought their procurement process online to adapt to these new challenges. Using Bonfire Strategic Sourcing Software, they were able to quickly find vendors to assist with the Academy’s COVID-19 response. Marian P. Hamlett, Chief Financial Officer at Texans Can Academies, said, “One of our first projects was to put out an RFP for COVID-19 consultants to help us with our school reopening plans. I would have never known where to start. Through Bonfire, I was able to find and invite over 150 vendors to participate and we successfully found a contractor that will walk beside us as we figure out how to safely reopen our schools.” 

Leveraging software to respond to the COVID-19-related needs of constituents is not limited to academic institutions, either. Terry White, IT procurement expert covering procurement and disruptive technologies at global research firm Omdia said, “It has never been more important for government procurement teams to strengthen, stabilize, and regulate the procurement process with digital tools. Work from home, flexible working hours, and the need for rapid and efficient processing and evaluation of bids demands it. If not for the government agency themselves, then for the citizens they serve.” 

Procurement is the life source of any city, town, state, municipality, or any public sector entity needing to procure the right resources to keep their communities safe and operational. Software can help fasttrack that process and make public spending go even further, making it an ideal purchase for which to put your CARES funding towards. 

Get started with these 3 easy steps 

The right procurement software can empower you to maximize your budget and exponentially grow your CARES dollars. If you’re ready to start exploring procurement software options that can be expensed through CARES, here are your next steps.

1. Confirm that you have access to CARES funding. If you aren’t sure, speak to your finance department. Or, check out this list.

2. Get to know which procurement solutions are eligible for CARES funding. For instance, Bonfire Strategic Sourcing Software qualifies for CARES, and we’ve already helped CARES recipients sign-on and ensure their funding reporting obligations are met. We’d love to help you as well.

3. Get started as soon as possible—December 30 will be here before you know it! Let our experts help you get up and running with Strategic Sourcing Software in as little as one week.

December 30 is just around the corner; don’t lose your CARES funding by missing the deadline. If you’re still stuck on how to maximize your CARES funding to address constituents’ needs in the most impactful way possible, we’ve teamed up with grants management leader eCivis to bring you THE definitive guide on finding and maximizing your COVID-19 funding. Download your copy for free here.

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.

Procurement teams were already expected to do more with less—and as public agencies navigate working within scaled-back budgets, procurement teams will be responsible for reducing costs even more. In this new environment, achieving the absolute best value for your bids and RFPs is more important than ever, and vendor competition is a key player in that effort. 

So how has COVID-19 impacted vendor competition on public bids, and how are government agencies responding? 

How has COVID-19 affected public sector vendor competition?

In our State of Public Sourcing: COVID 19 Edition report, we took a look at the average proposal submissions per project, comparing January/February and March/April 2020 data to 2019 data. Here’s what we found.

When comparing January/February 2020 to March/April 2020, we see that the average volume of proposals per project has increased slightly from 3.9 to 4.1 In other words, there has been a 5% increase in vendor competition on public bids. 

A case for continually engaging new vendors

In March and April 2020, as public organizations significantly reduced their open bids due to the uncertainty that came with COVID-19 and mandated lockdowns, suppliers may have had fewer options on solicitations to bid on. At the same time, the climate of economic uncertainty may have motivated suppliers to seek additional business, accounting for the increased vendor competition.

In times of economic instability, state and local governments play a critical role not only by providing businesses and individuals with the services and programs they need to weather the blow, but also by stimulating the economy by purchasing goods and services. In fact, government spending accounts for 17% of total GDP. 

Although vendor competition is on the rise right now, public procurement teams need to understand that engaging vendors and diversifying their supplier base in new and creative ways is critical to overcoming supply shortages, awarding contracts within project deadlines, and stimulating local and national economies. 

See it in action: How Louisville Metro Government is innovating their vendor outreach

To meet these needs and overcome these challenges, procurement teams are intentionally engaging new and existing vendors in creative and innovative ways.

In our State of Public Sourcing report, we covered this story from Joel Neaveill, Director of Procurement for the Louisville Metro Government:

“Our vendors were affected—the ones that we usually go to for supply were completely out. So you have to turn to others and be a little more creative. In terms of diversifying the supplier base, we found that through this emergency, we’ve been able to bring on new vendors that we haven’t dealt with before.

“Our local economy, like everyone’s local economy, is just hurting so much. The restaurant and hospitality businesses are hurting. Through this emergency, we’re turning to them to help supply part of the response to the emergency. We’re feeding local seniors who can’t get out of their homes by turning to local caterers to help with that. We’ve launched a program to help first responders who are healthy but can’t return back to their homes in fear of infecting them, so we’re tapping into the hospitality sector, the hotels, to implement those programs. We’re also providing face covers for all 5500 Louisville Metro employees, and we had those custom-made from a sewing shop in central Kentucky. We’re helping to stimulate the local economy through this emergency.”

“We also have a list of minority- and women-owned businesses that, as part of the incident management team, we look through an equity lens—how are we equitably responding to this so we don’t have disparate outcomes?” 

The good news is, as COVID-19 continues to impact the public sector, vendor competition is on the rise. That doesn’t mean it’s time to hit pause on intentionally engaging and diversifying your vendor pool; in fact, using competition to drive better value for your bids and RFPs will only become more and more important as public agencies prioritize cost savings and re-evaluating budgets. Agencies that can develop innovative solutions now will be the ones to weather the forecasted economic blows in the next months and years.

For more insights on how public procurement teams responded to COVID-19, and how these lessons learned can help prepare your organization for the future, download your copy of the State of Public Sourcing: COVID-19 Edition.

Digital procurement tools can empower your team to reduce costs and drive best value for your agency by streamlining operational tasks, increasing vendor competition, and fostering better stakeholder collaboration. And as many teams work in a remote environment, having the ability to conduct all procurement tasks online is more important than ever. But with COVID-19 leading to tightened budgets and a focus on cost savings in the public sector, is now the time to advocate for procurement software? 

In our latest State of Public Sourcing Report, we dug into first-party data on how COVID-19 and remote work were impacting public procurement teams. We came away with two findings: 1) Public agencies are recognizing the role procurement plays in a crisis, and 2) public agencies are open to investments in technology—particularly digital procurement.

Let’s take a closer look at how we came to those conclusions, and why they point to the fact that now is, in fact, the right time to advocate for procurement technology. 

Public agencies are recognizing the role procurement plays in a crisis

When COVID-19 first hit North America, we saw firsthand from our clients that public procurement teams pivoted their efforts to run more urgent bids with shorter timelines. Our data showed that the average organization was running 2.5 RFP project types and 4.3 non-RFP project types (such as price-driven bids or invitationals).

Procurement teams have been doing what they can to streamline these projects and get emergency supplies to the frontlines quickly and compliantly. RFP projects have gone from having an average of 4.46 evaluators to 3.8 evaluators—a 15% decrease. The average number of pages per vendor submission went from 207 to 156 (25% decrease), likely because procurement teams are reducing and re-prioritizing criteria so that proposals can be submitted by vendors and scored by evaluators more quickly. 

To meet their constituents’ new and unexpected needs at this time, while managing supply shortages, creativity is a critical skill for procurement teams. One of our favorite stories covered in The State of Public Sourcing Report is from the St. Joseph’s Health System. When long-term care facilities across the country moved from providing meals in a dining area to individual rooms, there was a nationwide shortage of overbed tables. St. Joseph’s Health System overcame these challenges by sourcing TV tables instead in order to meet this unique need.

In times of crisis, constituents look to their government, and procurement is the driving force in practically ensuring people get the goods and services they need. Public agencies are recognizing procurement’s role not just as an operational process, but as a strategic partner, especially in times of crisis. 

Public agencies are open to investments in technology—particularly digital procurement

Compared to last year, public organizations are conducting 37% more telecommunications bids and RFPs.

Educational institutions and municipalities in particular are investing in telecom software at an unprecedented rate. Many K-12 and higher education institutions brought learning online in March and April, resulting in a 219% increase in telecommunications bids and RFPs. Municipalities, similarly, saw a 118% increase in telecommunications bids as local governments adjusted to a new remote work reality.

Although public agencies may have previously viewed IT and software as a “nice to have” rather than a business-critical expense, as many organizations have had to make the jump to remote work, software services that enable remote productivity and communication have become critical to ensuring business continuity.

Additionally, our State of Public Sourcing Report found that 73% of procurement professionals said COVID-19’s effects caused their organization to realize how vital digital procurement is, and that their organization will continue to make it a priority. 

Not only are public agencies recognizing the power of software to meet their constituents’ needs during times of crisis, but there is a new understanding of the role digital procurement has in the public sector. This presents a unique opportunity for procurement teams like yours to advocate for the digital tools that will future-proof your processes for any future disruptions.

The role of procurement has never been more challenging; at the same time, the importance of procurement has never been more in the spotlight. Amidst this newfound appreciation for procurement’s role in a crisis, as well as public agencies’ changing mentality towards the business-critical nature of digital tools, now is the time to advocate for the procurement software that will help you streamline your bids and RFPs, drive connection between procurement and the rest of your organization, and access benchmarks and templates to make more data-driven decisions.

For more data and insights on how your North American public procurement peers have responded to COVID-19 and remote work, download your copy of The State of Public Sourcing: COVID-19 Edition report.

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure” – Peter Drucker 

In a time of constricted budgets, reduced resources, and prioritized emergency spending, it’s important that your procurement team is performing to the best of their abilities. However, it’s hard to know how your team can improve if you aren’t monitoring the data and trends of your department and individual contributors. 

To uncover the procurement KPI’s that will improve your team’s performance, ask yourself: Which of your departments has the longest average time-to-award? Which buyer has the lowest vendor engagement? Which projects saw the greatest savings compared to last year? If you don’t know the answers to these types of questions, don’t worry, you’re not alone. That’s why we’ve narrowed down the top procurement KPI’s that will empower your team to improve—and how Bonfire Strategic Sourcing Software can help.

Procurement KPI #1: Project Components

Project components—such as the requested information, criteria weighting, or the number of evaluators and vendors involved in each project—are vital components of RFx events. These project components will often vary depending on the project type (ITB, RFQ, RFP, etc.) and therefore are delineated as such. With Bonfire Insights, you can determine if your results are aligned with your goals—or if there are problem areas that need addressing. 

Beyond analyzing the trends of your internal projects, you can take your analysis a step further by comparing your typical project setup against our database of 40,000 procurement events through our latest Benchmarking feature. Benchmarking allows you to see how your peers in procurement have set up similar projects for the same category, including data on project timelines, criteria weighting, vendor engagement, and requested information, as well as view RFx documents of comparable opportunities.

When it comes to selecting your project components, decisions made early-on can have long-lasting impacts throughout the lifecycle of the project. For example, while criteria weighting plays a significant role in which vendor will be selected, we also know that it can be a deciding factor on whether vendors decide to submit or not. Therefore, it’s important to make these decisions (the “who, what, and why” of your project) with confidence and conviction.

Procurement KPI #2: Timelines

Project timelines can be a critical indicator of how efficient your team is performing.  When deadlines are tight, and end-users request goods and services to be delivered as soon as possible, time-to-value is imperative.  

 To optimize your timeline, it’s important to investigate the details. For example:

• Which stages of your projects are taking up the most time? 
• Are your price-only bids being awarded quickly? 
• Which buyers are most efficient with their timelines? 
• Are your projects open for the appropriate length? 

 Each of these questions provide an opportunity for your team to improve.

To ensure your timeline goals are consistently met, the planning phase becomes crucial.  Utilizing Bonfire Intake allows you to monitor projects from the initial request, and integrate strategic planning during the initial phases of each project — ensuring that bids and RFPs are set-up for success.

 Procurement KPI #3: Spend and Savings

Project Spend and Project Savings are potentially the two most important metrics you’ll be reporting on as a team. While procurement teams are often viewed as the ones who spend the money, public agencies are increasingly discovering procurement’s potential as a resource to save money as well.

With the Bonfire Cost Management feature, you’re able to track your current spend, target spend, projected budget, and percent savings. These metrics can be reported and visualized for each individual project, or by project type, buyer, and department. 

 A note on savings:

With primary goals of transparency, risk avoidance, and best value, public procurement teams often lack the single-minded focus on cost savings of their private sector peers. Nevertheless, public procurement teams have a significant role to play in optimizing spend for their organizations. Based on our State of the RFP Report (2019), we uncovered some key metrics that help determine how to save money when running an RFP:

•  Across 2019, there was an average of 34% difference between the highest and lowest priced vendors in a given RFP
•  One additional vendor increased the price spread by 3% on average
•  The difference between the winning vendor’s price and the average proposal price for each RFP was greater than 20%
•  BAFO (Best and Final Offer) opportunities have been shown to result in an average of 12% savings when incorporated into a regular RFx event.

Procurement KPI #4: Sustainability

Does your organization value environmental initiatives? Procurement workflows that rely on physical documents and scorecards can lead to a lot of paper waste. By digitizing your processes through an eSourcing solution like Bonfire, you can positively contribute to your organization’s sustainability mandate. Bonfire even tracks the number of printed pages your department has saved over time. For example, Ventura County has eliminated 170,000 pages of paper since implementing Bonfire, saving them significant storage, filing, and paper shredding costs.  

Ready to start tracking the procurement KPIs that will take your team’s performance to the next level? Try Bonfire for free to get started. 

Already a Bonfire client? Bonfire Insights is free and available to all Bonfire users.  To learn more about utilizing Insights to empower your team, reach out to your representative or [email protected] today!