Industry: Public

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have become an essential tool for complex organizations, but when it comes to procurement in the public sector, they aren’t enough. 

As public procurement partners, we speak to many procurement professionals at public sector agencies, and we frequently hear one common refrain—that they feel imprisoned by their ERP. For many of them, their organizations have invested a lot of time and money in ERP systems that do many things well and are there to stay. But to make them work as general admin tools requires a lot of finessing and fitting square pegs into round holes—leaving too much of procurement up to error-prone manual processes. If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because procurement in the public sector involves unique challenges that ERP systems built for corporations were never designed for.

Here are the specific areas where they tend to fall short:

1. Limited supplier reach: ERP systems don’t go far enough when it comes to reaching and managing suppliers. There’s often little visibility into supplier performance and risk, limited supplier collaboration and communication, and little or no ability to manage supplier contracts and agreements. Not to mention, ERPs can’t connect you with the vendor communities and networks that sometimes come with a dedicated procurement solution, which means that fewer qualified vendors see and bid on your agency’s solicitations in the first place.

2. Contract management frustration: ERP systems might have basic contract management capabilities, but they can’t handle the whole contract lifecycle, from creation to execution and renewal. Procurement software offers a one-stop solution that covers the whole range of contract management challenges.

3. No integrated workflows: ERP systems don’t provide integrated workflows or automatic approval management, making it difficult to set up and maintain efficient procurement processes. On the other hand, purpose-built procurement software gives you control over your workflows and approvals, often with added features like notifications and integrated messaging, all of which makes it easier for you to get your job done.

4. Spend analysis shortcomings: ERP systems don’t provide detailed and actionable spend analysis to help you and your stakeholders save money, but specialized procurement software gives you a complete view of your procurement spend, helping you track and find cost-saving opportunities.

5. Weak vendor performance tracking: ERP systems don’t provide robust vendor performance tracking capabilities, making it difficult to make sure your suppliers are living up to their obligations. Meanwhile, purpose-built procurement software collects feedback from stakeholders and gives you real-time data and insights to help you monitor supplier performance and ensure compliance.

6. No collaboration: ERP systems don’t provide support for collaborative procurement, making it difficult for procurement or evaluation teams to work together. Purpose-built procurement software provides a platform for collaboration, helping procurement teams achieve better and faster results.

7. No eSourcing: ERP systems often don’t have eSourcing capabilities, making it hard to manage sourcing events electronically. There isn’t a place for procurement and its stakeholders to build solicitations and RFPs collaboratively, no place for suppliers to see your solicitations or submit bids, no support for sealed bids, no bid evaluation tools, and no integrated way to track internal and external communication that may be needed later to support a purchasing decision.

8. No supplier diversity tracking: ERP systems don’t have the capability to track supplier diversity, making it difficult to monitor diversity goals and initiatives or even comply with regulations. Purpose-built procurement software has tools to help procurement professionals meet diversity goals and requirements.

9. No support for strategic sourcing: ERP systems don‘t offer support for strategic sourcing, which is critical for optimizing spend and driving savings. They’re not tied in to co-op and piggyback sourcing opportunities, and they can’t bring all your sourcing data together to help you make better purchasing decisions. Purpose-built procurement software has the tools and insights you need to support your agency’s strategic sourcing efforts.

10. No audit trails: ERP systems aren’t equipped to collect and store all the data and communications an agency needs when facing a supplier dispute or regulatory trouble, but a built-for-purpose solution will record everything important, and even guide users towards defensible decisions – by flagging outlier evaluator scores or requiring written justifications from evaluators, for example. 

ERP systems are great for many things, and are integral to many public agencies’ core functions, like finance management and HR. But when it comes to procurement, they simply don’t have the capabilities needed to support procurement professionals. Luckily, there are alternatives built just for public sector procurement, coming with all the tools and capabilities you need to achieve procurement excellence. And you don’t have to give up your ERP, either. Many procurement software packages offer integrations that can exchange data with your ERP, making purpose-built procurement software the perfect ERP complement.

Mitigating risk is one of the most important responsibilities an organization’s finance leader has. So why do so few pay close attention to procurement, an area bristling with risk? Can they trust that others in their organizations are looking after those risks, or is this a potentially dangerous blind spot for them?

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the risks inherent in public sector procurement and why finance leaders should care. Finally, we’ll show that it isn’t all doom and gloom by outlining some steps public sector finance leaders can take to assess and improve their agencies’ procurement risk profiles.

 

Ten risks intrinsic to public sector procurement

The risks inherent in public sector procurement are wide-ranging. Here’s what it looks like when they’re not well-managed.

• Procurement requests are frequently delayed or forgotten entirely. When there’s no formal system to receive and track procurement requests, they can sit unaddressed for a long time, wasting time right from the outset that can’t be recovered.

• The right vendors don’t see your solicitations, so you can’t get the best services, goods, and value for your stakeholders. The best solicitations in the world can’t get results for your agency if they’re hard to find.

• Unqualified vendors are allowed to bid because there isn’t a system in place to screen bidders for necessary qualifications and certifications. That means you waste time sorting through bids that can’t be considered or, worse, you get all the way through the evaluation stage before realizing not all bidders meet the qualifications.

• Evaluations are unintentionally corrupted. For someone trying to mitigate risk, evaluations are one of the most challenging areas of procurement because evaluations are often qualitative and subjective. An evaluator’s failure to understand the evaluation criteria, a hasty reading of the bid details, or unconscious cognitive bias can all lead to suspect evaluations that can’t withstand scrutiny.

• Evaluations are deliberately corrupted. In addition to unconscious bias, there’s also deliberate bias to worry about, which leaves an agency open to accusations of unfair or discriminatory dealing. If evaluators can score bids any way they like, with poor reasons or no reasons given, it becomes impossible for an agency to defend its procurement decisions.
  
  In the absence of risk-mitigating controls (like requiring evaluators to provide reasons for their decisions), even well-intentioned evaluators can let their assumptions and biases lead them towards counterproductive and risky habits that eventually become organizational norms.

• Approvals create bottlenecks that disrupt procurement timelines. Procurement is often the last thing on approvers’ minds, so without a system to keep approvals moving, they languish. At best, time is needlessly wasted; at worst, critical services and supplies aren’t procured as promptly as they’re needed.

• Poor record-keeping exposes the agency to regulatory and PR risks. To avoid an uncomfortable spotlight, public agencies have to be above suspicion and ready to respond to questions and disputes with credible records and facts. Without help from automation and technology, this is a practical impossibility.

• Rogue purchases occur because nobody wants to work with procurement. It’s human nature to go around obstacles that get in the way of our goals. When people treat the procurement department as an obstacle rather than providers of a valuable service, they cut corners that expose the organization to risk.

• Important knowledge doesn’t become institutionalized. In many organizations, people know how to do their jobs well, but nothing’s written down or systematized. This leaves an agency vulnerable to losing key people and finding itself unable to function.
• Poor vendor performance goes unnoticed or unaddressed. This risk is one of the most dangerous because it quietly drains value from a community, year after year, while remaining just under everyone’s radar. It’s usually only when something really egregious happens that this problem gets attention, but by then the damage is done.

What to do about procurement risk

While the list of procurement risks can be daunting, there are software solutions available to manage them. 

Procurement software offers a range of benefits, including streamlined procurement requests, vendor qualification, and minimized corruption in the evaluation process. It can also speed up approvals, reduce bottlenecks, and maintain reliable records to avoid regulatory and PR risks.

Moreover, procurement software can encourage cooperation with the procurement department, institutionalize critical knowledge, and ensure poor vendor performance isn’t overlooked. By using benchmarks and community data, the most capable software solutions can identify and solve common procurement problems.

It’s important to note that not every agency needs cutting-edge functionality in every area, and the most expensive solution is not necessarily the best. The key is to find software that addresses your agency’s specific needs. The best way to know what your needs are is usually through an internal risk assessment that compares the current state to the desired state and identifies the gaps between them.

Public sector procurement simply has too many moving parts for people to keep track of and manage without some help from technology, which is why procurement software is an essential tool for public sector agencies. By identifying and investing in software that meets your agency’s specific needs, you can achieve significant improvements in your procurement processes while reducing risk at the same time.

Innovations shaping our future—that was the theme of this year’s NIGP Annual Forum hosted in Boston from August 21st to 24th. Getting together to share knowledge and experiences while tackling new challenges is something so fundamental to public procurement and we love to see the collaboration and passion for the profession at these events.

This year, we’re celebrating the (usually unsung) superheroes in public procurement and, between our booth and the events we hosted, we were able to truly showcase those superpowers at the conference. We hosted our first ever Bonfire Procurement Awards reception to honor our clients who are moving mountains in their organizations. Then in our case study session, we heard how public procurement teams are using Bonfire to drive their organizations forward and positively impact the communities they serve.

At the Bonfire booth, we had the pleasure of speaking with hundreds of attendees from all sides of public procurement. We asked visitors to participate in a poll and tell us what procurement superpower they’d like to unlock in their organization with 120 overall respondents. Digitization won by a landslide and that’s fitting considering procurement digital transformation was a large focus of this year’s conference.

Throughout all these conversations and sitting in on educational sessions, there were three points we heard over and over:

• The benefits (and trials) of procurement digital transformation
• Prioritizing vendor engagement and experience
• The future of work, and how to attract and retain new staff in today’s context

Keep reading for the details of what we learned from NIGP Annual Forum 2022.

Procurement digital transformation

The first common thread we encountered was frustration around digitizing procurement processes. A lot of people vented frustrations over paper-based manual processes, legacy or homegrown systems, and overly-complicated ERP procurement modules.

One session touched a lot on ERPs and asked the audience if they were satisfied with how they were performing. The answer was a resounding ‘no’. We talked with many attendees about challenging the idea that procurement needs to go through an ERP and the barriers to moving towards purpose-built solutions. Many of the tools procurement teams are searching for (contract management, evaluations, vendor engagement, etc.) simply don’t exist in ERPs.

One barrier that came up frequently was buy-in. Aversion to tech in the public sector is nothing new and reasons vary, but it’s becoming more painful to overcome. Challenging the “this is how it’s always been done” mentality can be incredibly frustrating. To frame procurement technology in a different light, in the session titled “What’s Next for Procurement”, Lisa Mehalko, Director of Procurement for Georgia Tech Authority, made a point to say that tech isn’t going to replace a procurement professional’s job. What it will do is free up time so procurement pros can understand the market better than anyone.

Prioritizing vendor engagement and experience

Building strong alliances with vendors has taken a front seat for many organizations and was a strong focus at NIGP this year.

One common topic was streamlining vendor experience and increasing vendor engagement through technology. Many stated a system that makes it easier for vendors to submit bids has increased engagement and vendor satisfaction.

As an added benefit, easier bid submissions removes barriers for small and diverse businesses—which is an emerging priority. The importance of engaging these businesses was summed up in our Innovation for Impact case study session by Glenn O’Steen, Manager, Procurement at Columbia County, Georgia: “Without small businesses, we wouldn’t have an economy. If we neglect this group of businesses, our economy would shut down.”

Watch the full session to gain more insights from Glenn and his co-panelists from diverse areas of public procurement.

Staffing and retention: The Great Realignment

The shift from the ‘Great Resignation’ to the ‘Great Realignment’ was an interesting topic. The term ‘Great Realignment’ comes from examining the needs and values of today’s workforce and adjusting to meet them. We attended a session that explored the ways different generations view their employment—including the disconnect between what older and younger generations value in a job.

Attracting and retaining talent has been a huge challenge for procurement. Many employees are retiring and younger employees are more selective when choosing jobs that fit their core values. Unsurprisingly, this theme ties closely with digital transformation. Younger employees are leaving in search of jobs that use more tech in procurement—citing efficiency frustrations and a more reasonable workload as reasons.

Gain insights for the future of public procurement

Public procurement teams are facing a host of new challenges in a post-pandemic world that’s forcing a lot of change all at once. Stay on top of things by getting insights into procurement technology, vendor engagement, and so much more in the 2022 State of Public Sourcing report. Get your copy here.

One of the most challenging parts of putting together an RFP is getting stakeholders involved in the build process without creating chaos. If you’ve ever had different document versions from multiple editors get stored in different locations, or you’ve experienced painful approval processes that take place through endless email chains, you know how frustrating and time-consuming that chaos can be.

Eliminating that chaos reduces aggravation and waste, but also leads to happier stakeholders, more engaged vendors, and better solicitations that lead to better outcomes. With demands on public sector procurement teams increasing all the time, the need for effective RFP collaboration will continue to increase, too.

In this blog post, we’ll take a look at why RFP collaborations tends to be so chaotic, and how Bonfire helps transform the chaos into productive teamwork.

The sources of RFP collaboration headaches

The process of creating and posting solicitations is intrinsically cooperative; requesters, procurement professionals, evaluators, and approvers each have their own concerns, tools, and processes. Shoving them all together creates challenges that you may be all-too-familiar with, including:

• Tracking changes and comments: Keeping track of document edits becomes difficult when people prefer different editing tools and approaches.
• Managing document approvals: Approvals become cumbersome and slow the procurement process down because approvers have other jobs; they become a procurement bottleneck.
• Compliance and version control: Good change histories are hard to maintain, contributors are working on different versions of the same document, and viewing or rolling back to earlier versions is hard or impossible. This isn’t just inconvenient; it’s a serious compliance risk.
• Time management: Inefficient communication and unnecessary extra cycles make it hard to scale procurement operations up to the increasing demands stakeholders make on procurement teams.

These are the collaboration headaches we hear about most often from the public sector organizations we talk to. As part of our commitment to make public procurement teams as effective as possible, we decided to develop a solution.

Solving RFP Collaboration

In looking for a solution, we quickly found our way to a list of capabilities we knew procurement professionals needed – capabilities that, together, would make RFP collaboration easy by helping procurement professionals to:

• Maintain one source of the truth by keeping RFP documents in one place; no more fumbling through cloud and network drives.
• See who changed what, and when, and keep an auditable record of edits.
• Control access to documents from one place, granting viewing or editing privileges as needed.
• Do more with templates, including better template searching and a way to cascade template changes down to individual documents.
• Edit documents without leaving Bonfire.

 

The future of RFP collaboration

The need for collaborative tools in procurement isn’t going away, which is why we’re not stopping at these capabilities. Streamlining collaboration is one of the biggest opportunities for improvement that exists in the solicitation building process, and Bonfire is committed to leading the way, so stay tuned as we continue to develop and announce new Bonfire Solicitation Builder features and other collaborative tools in the future.

Learn more about Bonfire Solicitation Builder

We couldn’t be more excited about Bonfire Solicitation Builder, and we can’t wait to hear what you think! Learn more by visiting the Bonfire Solicitation Builder web page or get in touch with us now to book a demo!

Caribbean procurement departments face a lot of challenges that other countries typically do not. Whether it’s moving on from a complex custom eProcurement solution or stewarding public trust, there are many factors that Caribbean procurement leaders need to navigate to see success.

Recently, we set up a panel discussion with Craig Milley, Principal Consultant at Wayfinder Consulting Inc., and Joe Fagan, an eProcurement consultant with many donor banks, who both work directly with Caribbean procurement departments. The aim of this event was to help Caribbean government agencies see sustainable success in eProcurement transformation.

Continue reading to see the summary of this discussion or watch the full recording of this webinar here.

Defining eProcurement and where to start

Getting started with eProcurement can be daunting if one doesn’t understand the reality of the tool. eProcurement is just that, a tool, not a magical cure-all to all of your procurement department’s challenges.

The panelists discussed different challenges that should be identified before moving forward in your eProcurement transformation such as financial reasons, ease of access for vendors, or transparency to foster trust from vendors and the public.

eProcurement is a tool that supports and facilitates the exchange of information between all involved parties and can help you address those identified challenges. That being said, the success of eProcurement greatly depends on your policies and processes and how they evolve to be able to take advantage of technology.

Best-of-breed, what does it mean?

Taking on a large, complicated tool like an ERP with hopes that it will solve all your procurement woes will most likely do more harm than good. Although ERPs have their advantages in certain use cases, they simply aren’t built for the rigor and regulations of public sector sourcing and contracting. One approach is to find software that does one thing really well to address the specific problem you’re having and stitching it together with other systems that address other specific problems. This is the “best-of-breed” approach.

In a previous article we phrased it as “a ‘swiss-army knife approach’ to buying software.”

SaaS and off-the-shelf solutions

Deciding on which solution to go with, it comes down to what tools and functionality you need and the capacity of your team. Overall, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and off-the-shelf solutions have more benefits than custom-built tools that take a lot of time and resources to build and sustain (and that’s not even counting the time it takes to train and support users). Many governments—not just those in the Caribbean—don’t have the luxury of those resources.

Here are a few benefits of SaaS and off-the-shelf solutions our experts outlined:

• Software vendor handles security and other IT infrastructure
• Usually includes a vendor database
• Fast implementation and onboarding
• Less vulnerable to cyber attacks
• Sustainable and scalable
• Support and training handled by the vendor
• Can choose vendor with most user-friendly tool

Simplicity is key! A common issue with custom or in-house-built solutions is they are very complex. One question that Craig Milley asks when determining the user-friendliness and ease-of-use of a software is the Amazon test. Is using the software more difficult than shopping on Amazon? If yes, then that may not be the software best-suited to your team or solving your particular problem. Choosing a software that is easy to use and intuitive avoids putting the burden of learning it on the end user of the system while addressing your issue.

Prioritization and change management

The key to any large project within any organization is buy-in. The panelists discussed creating supportive relationships with C-level executives, management, and those you will be working closely with. Educate them on how this change will make their jobs easier and benefit the organization as a whole. Finding those champions that believe in your cause will help you bring others into the fold for a smoother transition and adoption.

At all costs, avoid big changes all at once. Don’t make transforming your procurement into a daunting process. Instead try for slow, manageable changes with constant communication and support for stakeholders.

The successful eProcurement transformation recipe

For the last portion of the discussion, we asked the panelists what their “recipe for success” in eProcurement transformation looks like.

Here are some actionable steps they recommended:

• Define the problem you want to solve (such as increasing efficiency, fostering collaboration, or better managing your vendors) and establish manageable scope. Remember that technology alone won’t solve a broken process; take a look at how your current process is road-blocking your procurement goals and research solutions that will transform those processes.
• Find the right software solution that has been purpose-built to solve your specified challenges. Be sure to select a provider with a relatively fast implementation time so that you can start to bring your processes online while expanding the scope of what you need. Start with small, manageable wins.
• Work with the provider to ensure stakeholder buy-in, considering items that will make life easier for your evaluators and vendors, such as support hours, implementation services, and easy-to-use tools.
• Get started!

Start your eProcurement journey with Bonfire

There’s no “one size fits all” way to successfully transform eProcurement in your organization but this event was intended to give Caribbean nations a solid foundation to get started on. It doesn’t need to be an overnight change and it doesn’t need to be a scary process.

Bonfire can help you get started at the pace that’s right for your organization.

Book a demo with one of our experts to see how Bonfire can help you achieve your eProcurement dreams.

All across the US, governments at the state, tribal, and local levels are wading through the enormous task of managing a combined $1.9 trillion in federal funding.

The money, approved in March 2021 through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), is helping communities at all levels rebound from the detrimental impacts of Covid-19. But, as it turns out, managing and allocating the funds is no easy task.

To help you navigate these opportunities and challenges, we reached out to two expert panelists: Joel Neavell, Director of Procurement for the Louisville Metro Government, and Ken Hillebrand, Deputy Director of the Louisville Accelerator Team. They joined our webinar, Everything About Accessing ARPA, to share firsthand experiences and insights gained over their first year managing Louisville’s $388 million in ARPA funding.

Keep reading for all the highlights from the webinar, including how to assemble the right team, use the money to support strategic goals, and meet compliance and reporting requirements.

Louisville’s approach to managing ARPA funds

After ARPA was approved by the federal government in 2021, the Louisville mayor assembled the Louisville Accelerator Team. Ken, who is deputy director on the team, said it was critical to hire the right personnel to manage the multi-year initiative. “We definitely had to add headcount to manage these funds,” said Ken. “Our grants person has said this is the most complex compliance and reporting grant that she’s ever seen from the federal government.”

The Accelerator Team manages ARPA funds in collaboration with Joel’s procurement team, the city’s federal grant specialists, and others in the Office of Management and Budget. The team’s primary function is to help departments and applicants with ARPA compliance and reporting.

Understanding the funding

There are some important things agencies need to know before they start planning how to use ARPA funding. Ken and Joel shared these tips:

Timeline

The US Treasury has placed a timeline on the use of ARPA funding:

• all funding must be “obligated” by December 31, 2024
• all funds and programming must be completed by December 31, 2026
• all reporting must be completed by March 2027

“It’s a large window,” Ken said, “but if we’re looking at large projects like affordable housing, those take several years and we need to get them started right away.”

Funding amount

ARPA is designed to be one-time funding and the amount that each jurisdiction is eligible for is determined by the federal government. Louisville received one allocation for its city entity and one for its county entity, totaling $388 million. The government is also eligible for ARPA money funneled through the state of Kentucky, but those projects are managed at the state level.

Eligible uses

ARPA funding is intended to drive pandemic recovery efforts, so Ken said projects must demonstrate some nexus to Covid-19. One exception is projects related to water, sewage, and broadband infrastructure. In Louisville, Council decided on seven priorities they wanted to address based on data around community need.

Reporting

Reporting and compliance requirements depend on the size of the locality – whether the population is above or below 250,000. For Louisville, there are three types of reports required: a quarterly report to the US Treasury Department, an annual report, called the Revenue Recovery Project Plan Report, and a monthly report to Metro Council.

The strategic side of ARPA

While $388 million seems like a lot of money, it barely scratches the surface of everything Louisville’s internal departments and community groups want to achieve. So how did they decide which projects to pursue? 

Prioritizing projects

Based on their seven priority areas, Council created working groups responsible for selecting high-impact projects. The working groups engaged the community through surveys and public meetings to find out how residents wanted to spend the money. For the first round of funding, the city focused on emergency response efforts to address the pandemic. In the second round, they began looking at longer-term projects.

Focusing on impact

“As we were looking at the projects, we looked at ‘okay what can we do that’s going to make an impact in our community over a period of time?’ So that, when we look back 5, 10, 15 years from now, we can say, ‘Hey, we made a good investment in our community,’” said Ken.

While deciding how to use the funding can feel overwhelming, Joel said it’s a huge opportunity to think innovatively about how to solve ongoing and emerging challenges. “It enables us to try new things. Even if we try it and we fail, we’re going beyond what we had been able to do without these resources.”

Preparing for the funding

Understanding the requirements for ARPA funding is a big learning curve for everyone involved: procurement, internal clients, suppliers, and nonprofits applying for grants.

Supporting stakeholders

On the procurement side, Louisville’s vendor community is used to working with the government on municipal projects. But they’re not as experienced with federal funding, which has certain federal procurement requirements.

“That really has been a big learning curve for all of us, on the vendor side and even on our staff side — making sure we’re checking all the boxes, that we aren’t doing something that would result in us having to return the money back to the federal government,” said Joel.

It’s the same for internal clients who “get approved for projects but then don’t understand requirements,” said Joel. “There is a need on [procurement’s] side to upskill our own staff on how to manage expectations.”

Working with nonprofits

Nonprofits also need to get up to speed on how to apply for grants available through ARPA. For each grant opportunity, Louisville releases a request for applications (RFA) on Bonfire. Using Bonfire makes the process easier for both applicants and the project team, ensuring easy access to documents, centralized collaboration, and a transparent scoring system.

Ken’s team is looking to take it one step further and provide a more in-depth two- to three-hour session to help new nonprofits learn the ropes. “Some of these groups aren’t even grassroots, they’re just seedlings… We want to go the extra step to help reduce complexities. Our goal is that they’re all successful – in applying and getting the award.”

Take advantage of ARPA funding

While the process of using ARPA funding may feel daunting, Ken and Joel say it’s an opportunity they couldn’t pass up to serve their community better.

“Regardless of the lift, it’s a necessary catalyst for recovery,” said Joel. “We might not see these projects have immediate results. But these are investments that we’re going to see the benefits for hopefully years from now. You either see it as another burden on the back office of government or you say, ‘This could transform our city or our town and we have the opportunity to do that.’”

Want to learn more about how to effectively spend and manage ARPA funding? Schedule a demo to see how Bonfire can help.

Considering everything you do for your agencies, colleagues, and communities, there’s no question that public procurement professionals are on our “nice” list every year! Even though the holidays are coming fast, we couldn’t wait another minute to give you this special gift.

Bonfire Open Access Community Projects is a searchable repository of public projects from our growing database of over 500 public sector agencies across North America. And the best part? It’s completely free to use for public procurement professionals everywhere. Consider it our way to say thanks and send a little festive cheer this holiday season.

Tens of thousands of templates, all wrapped up in a bright red bow

Procurement teams can get requests for everything from pothole patching to software to PPE. When facing new or unfamiliar projects, you might have to spend hours searching the web for RFP templates.

How much time could you save if you never had to start another RFP from scratch again? With a large and growing database of RFx templates available, Bonfire Open Access Community Projects is designed to help make your busy job easier:

• Search tens of thousands of public projects and filter by location, project type, organization, and more
• Draw from thousands of new projects added monthly from over 500 public sector agencies
• Use the tool completely for free if you’re a public procurement professional
• Free up time for higher-level, strategic tasks (and hopefully a little festive decorating, cookie eating and cozying up by the fire this holiday season!)

Sign up today and see the benefits right away.

Unwrap the gift of time

Helping public procurement teams work more efficiently is a critical element of what we do at Bonfire — and so is facilitating collaboration within and between agencies. With Bonfire Open Access Community Projects, teams get best-in-class examples of successful RFPs to model their own projects, eliminating the need to create net-new documents.

Here’s what Bonfire CEO Omar Salaymeh had to say: “Our data found that public agencies ran 39% more projects in 2021 compared to 2020, and with the Biden administration’s newly-approved Build Back Better infrastructure funding, we believe that number is going to skyrocket. We’re making Bonfire Open Access Community Projects free to all public procurement teams everywhere, making it easy to access resources from their peers and effectively helping them spend less time and effort physically drafting RFP documents.”

See how Bonfire Open Access Community Projects helped save Christmas!

Hear those sleigh bells ringing? Thanks to Bonfire Open Access Community Projects, one special public servant was able to make critical repairs to his sleigh just in time for the busiest season of the year. Check out the video to see how…

Ready to join Santa in accessing best-in-class RFPs to save time on your projects? Sign up today for exclusive access.

Did you know that risks and inefficiencies in your contract management process can result in an estimated 9% increase in overall project spend?

When you’re managing contracts in the tens of thousands (or even millions) of dollars, that’s no small sum. 

Ultimately, unnecessary increases in project spend come down to four key risks in the contract management process. These mistakes do more than just impact your bottom line—they risk compliance to state and local mandates, as well as relationships with your suppliers. And they’re a lot more common than you think. 

Join Bonfire’s Anthony Berry as he outlines the four biggest contract management mistakes—and what you can do to avoid them

In this webinar, you'll learn:

• The state of public sector contract management today, including its benefits and challenges
• The four risks to effective contract management, and how they impact project spend
• A deep dive into the Bonfire Contract Management solution, and how its tools and features can help minimize these risks

Public agencies are getting back to business in 2021 and procurement teams are feeling the pressure to post more bids and complete more projects this year. But COVID-19 has changed the world of procurement—possibly forever. What does that mean for how public procurement departments work, collaborate, and plan for the future? Join Bonfire, as they analyze the key trends and challenges surfaced from the 2021 State of Public Sourcing Report. Walk away from this webinar with insight into how your public procurement peers are approaching new strategies in 2021 and beyond. 

After watching the webinar, learners will be able to:

• Have a thorough understanding of the trends that have evolved in public procurement over the past two years
• Understand strategies used by other public procurement teams in 2021 and moving into 2022
• Align your business goals and objectives to what is trending in public procurement's "new normal"