Industry: Public

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!

There’s no question that, when it comes to your bids and RFPs, the more vendor competition, the better the award value. That’s why sending vendor invitation letters—or a notification to suppliers through your eSourcing solution—is an important step to ensuring optimum vendor competition in your invitations to bid or request for proposals. 

Writing vendor invitation letters and selecting the appropriate vendors to send them to is no small task, so we wanted to look at the data behind this question: do more vendor invitations lead to more submitted proposals? And is there an optimal number where you’re maximizing competition without sending out more invites than you need to? We discovered that the answer is yes, sending more invites leads to more submissions…but there is a point when quality is more important than quantity. 

How many invitations is too many?

To answer these questions, we took a look at competitive events in the Bonfire database that had sent out at least one vendor invitation. As we started digging into the data, we noticed the range of the number of vendor invites per project varied widely; some projects had sent just a few vendor invitations and some had sent out hundreds. 

If your guess is that sending out more vendor invitations will result in more results, you are correct—to an extent. Our study uncovered that there is a threshold of optimal invites sent, and it’s likely not worth your time or effort to send more than that. 

To come to that conclusion, we first created a plot comparing the number of vendor invitations and the corresponding average number of complete submissions received for all projects in the dataset. For instance, if there were three projects that sent out 5 invitations, and one received 2 submissions, another 3, and another 4, the average number of complete submissions would be 3. When we removed outliers from the data, the plot looked like this: 

Here, we can see a positive correlation; as the number of vendor invitation letters increases, so does the number of submissions received. What happens if we view the trend beyond 18 vendor submissions? 

The average number of complete submissions received does become more random past 20 invitations, but the positive correlation we saw in the previous graph is somewhat maintained up to 35 invitations. 

This suggests that continuously sending out invitations to more than 35 vendors does not necessarily increase the number of submissions you receive. As efficiency becomes more important than ever before for procurement teams, focusing on sending the right invitations rather than just a high volume of letters is critical for running strategic and streamlined competitive events. 

How many proposals come from invitations?

Obviously, vendor invitation letters play a big role in increasing vendor competition, but how much so? In other words, how many received proposals come from invitations?

To answer this question, we calculated the percentage of proposals received from vendors that had been invited to a project by dividing the number of proposals from invites by the total number of proposals received. On average, approximately 66% of proposals were from vendors that had been invited. So, for instance, if you received a total of 8 submissions, around 5 proposals would potentially come from invited vendors. 

The number of vendors you would need to invite to receive 5 proposals is another question—one that can be answered with Bonfire Benchmarking.

Conclusion

Whether you would prefer to say less is more, work smarter not harder, or quality over quantity, we found that sending out more vendor invitations leads to more proposals to a certain threshold of about 35 invites. As a procurement professional, your time is better spent sending fewer than 35 well-crafted and thoughtfully-selected invitations. 

Since vendor invitation letters or notifications are so critical to ensuring strong competition, set-up your next bid or RFP up for success by accessing data like this in your project planning. Besides giving you vendor competition insight such as how many invites you need to send to reach your desired number of submissions, Bonfire Benchmarking surfaces data from our library of 40,000+ North American competitive events to recommend timelines, criteria weighting, and requested documents based on similar projects. Try Bonfire for free to see for yourself how data-driven procurement can enable your team to make great bid and RFP decisions.

As software solutions for public sector functions become more and more ubiquitous, nailing down a software RFP template that is adaptable to all your software needs is more important than ever. 

Although public agencies may have previously seen government technology as a “nice to have,” the recent of impacts of COVID-19 are starting to chip away at that mentality. We found that, amongst our 400+ public sector clients, telecommunications competitive events had increased by 37% after COVID-19 first started impacting North America.

Before getting started on your software RFP template, check out these 4 tips that will help your RFPs capture the right data to make successful software purchasing decisions. 

Ask these security questions

For any organization, public or commercial, security is a top priority when implementing any software solution. We’ve compiled some basic questions that should always be included in your software RFP template, regardless of the solution you’re buying. They target the important areas of cloud-based deployment such as the location of data storage, data ownership, and how upgrades will be rolled out. We go more in-depth into the reasoning behind each of these questions in our 5 keys to buying software-as-a-service webinar.

• Where will my data be stored?
• What are your security policies?
• Do you use encryption in-transit and at-rest?
• Who owns the data?
• Do you back up data? How often and where?
• Which cloud provider do you use?
• Is your production environment separate from your development/testing/staging environment?
• What is your software development lifecycle? 

Prioritize client experience, not just support

At Bonfire, we took a look at first-party data to understand common criteria weightings in software RFP templates. On average, those criteria weightings are:

• 20% for the presentation/demo
• 10% for the implementation plan
• 10% for support/maintenance
• 50% for the technical specifications

Although many organizations put emphasis on implementation and support in their software RFPs, most don’t consider ongoing client experience, which ensures you’re getting the most value out of your investment. Client experience goes beyond implementation plans and technical support, including things like:

• An assigned Account Manager or Client Success Manager who will get to know your unique needs and challenges
• On-going training so that users can become experts in the product
• Support and training when new products or updates are released
• Self-teaching opportunities, like in-app product walkthroughs
• User conferences and meetups, in-person or virtually

Leverage national and local data and insights

When you create your software RFP template, you don’t need to start from scratch. As technology adoption and implementation continues to increase in the public sector, there is more data than ever before on how other organizations are structuring their evaluation criteria and weighting in their RFPs. Instead of searching Google for “software RFP templates” to get an idea of how your peers are structuring their solicitations, you can access best practice data from the start to ensure all your bids and RFPs are set-up for success.

But how do you gain access to the data that can inform your software RFPs? 

In our latest webinar, we introduced Bonfire Benchmarking, which provides procurement professionals with access to bid and RFP recommendations and templates surfaced from Bonfire’s library of 40,000+ competitive events. Bonfire Benchmarking provides procurement teams with national and local benchmarks on typical project timelines, evaluation criteria and weighting, vendor participation, and more. Watch the webinar to learn more.

In today’s fast-paced, connected world, digitizing procurement is table stakes—which is why Bonfire is evolving to do more than bring your processes online.

Everything you love about Bonfire is still here, but with new tools optimized for collaboration and built-in access to RFP insights and templates (surfaced from our library of 40,000+ projects), the new Bonfire has everything you need to make confident and data-driven decisions at every stage of the process.

In this webinar, you'll learn...

• How the new Bonfire Intake module can help you collaborate with your peers on their requests
• Tips on how to use the new Bonfire Benchmarks feature to deliver strategic advice to your colleagues
• Why we've introduced new tools and templates to supercharge your price-driven bids
• How Bonfire's product innovation is driven by clients and their evolving needs

Bonfire’s Rachel Friesen is joined by Steve Muxlow, President of Mobile Bonds, and Brendan Knowles, Bonfire Client Success Manager, to dive into eBonding: an efficient, secure, and compliant alternative to paper bonds. Learn how you can use Bonfire and eBonding to streamline your construction tenders online.

We get it. Your first electronic bid solicitation (e-solicitation) is nerve-racking. Will vendors be able to submit? Will your evaluation run smoothly? Will you miss your paper process?

Yes. Yes. And absolutely not, to be frank.

But nerves are normal—implementing new tools and processes can be challenging without a plan. At Bonfire, we’ve helped hundreds of public agencies navigate the transition from paper-based procurement to Bonfire (and we learned some tips ‘n tricks along the way!).

While some organizations jump right into the deep end and immerse themselves in eProcurement, others dip their toe in, hesitant to take the plunge. Maybe you’re ready to get up and running right away, but your vendors and evaluators aren’t. We’re here to help.

The Bonfire Client Experience team customizes implementation for each client. From our experience conducting hundreds of custom implementations, we developed the following strategies to help organizations move procurement online, no matter where they are in their technology-adoption journey.

Notify vendors of your transition before your first e-solicitation

Before your first electronic bid solicitation, we recommend sending vendors an email explaining your transition to an online system. This email should include the link to register for your online portal and explain that registration is free and easy, clearing them from challenges associated with paper submissions, such as printing and shipping costs. Not to mention, most suppliers have experience with online submissions, maybe at another agency or in another state. 

Transparent and proactive communication will ease vendors into eProcurement with fewer hiccups.

If you’re getting started with Bonfire, ask your Implementation Specialist to learn more. 

Keep vendor registration simple

Vendor registration fields are a great way to capture critical information before your vendor submits a proposal or bid. Sometimes, however, complicated or lengthy registration setups can deter vendors from joining your database. 

By making it easy for vendors to register on your portal, you can receive all critical information about your suppliers (i.e. DBE status) without making the registration process tedious.

Mimic your paper-bid process for the first few e-solicitations

Bonfire lets you create a “checklist” for vendor submissions, ensuring you receive required documentation (the less vendor rectification, the better!). These checklists, called Requested Information, are where vendors submit their files.

While your vendors get familiar with Bonfire, mimic your Requested Information to how you accepted documents in a paper process. For example, if you requested vendors to split their submission into a “Technical” envelope and a “Pricing” envelope, create two requested information slots: One for the technical files, one for pricing. 

By keeping your requested information similar to your paper process, vendors can adjust to their new submission process while following familiar concepts.

Take advantage of Bonfire’s resources

Concerned about your evaluation committee learning how to use Bonfire? Have no fear, instead, your evaluators will cheer.

For example, in May 2020, only about 1 percent of our support tickets came from evaluators. That’s because Bonfire’s evaluation tool is intuitive and easy to use! When you invite your reviewers to a project, they’ll receive an invitation with a 3-minute training video that summarizes the entire evaluation process. 

But there’s more.

Every week we host drop-in training sessions (you can check out the schedule and register here). If your evaluators want a refresher, they can sign up for this live training, available for free.

But there’s still more.

Our clients love our Bonfire User Guides, available on-demand and accessed directly from Bonfire. For example, this guide walks your evaluation committee through creating their account, accessing vendor documents, and completing their evaluation, whereas this guide reviews how to score a questionnaire. With screenshots, text-walkthroughs, and videos, we’ve got it all. 

Prepare for ravin’ reviews

After your vendors and evaluators get the hang of this new “electronic submission” thing, you’ll be pleased (and not surprised) with how much they love Bonfire. Here are examples of the great feedback we receive daily from vendors, thrilled about online submissions through Bonfire:

“Honestly I was terrified to be forced to do the online bid, but after going through it I totally changed my perception of the whole process. Positive experience for me.”

“Bonfire is probably the easiest and most straightforward of all the online sites we submit to. Keep up the good work.”

“This is one of the easiest digital submission processes I have ever used.”

“This process was the best experience yet!”

“This is how the proposal process should be. Thank you, keep up the good work!”

“Actually, the entire process was excellent. Reduces costs for submissions. Helps to manage timelines vs. trying to manage around riskier logistics for paper submissions. Technology is smooth. Communication, including notification of successful submission, is strong. I am very pleased with the tools.”

“The Bonfire portal is by far the best procurement site I have ever worked with. It is intuitive to use. I wish all utilities issuing RFPs used Bonfire. It is a million times better than the other sites.”

Rest easy knowing the team is here to support you, your vendors, and your evaluators. Whether it’s through vendor invitations, our Bonfire User Guides or our Training Program, our resources, tips ‘n tricks will ensure a smooth transition to electronic submissions.