Tag: Bidding Software

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.

Procurement professionals know the power of relationships in strategic sourcing. 

Better vendor relationships mean greater vendor competition. Engaged and aligned stakeholders conduct evaluations smoother and faster, making the procurement process more beneficial and less burdensome for those involved. 

Unfortunately, outdated and administratively-demanding processes can put undue stress on internal stakeholders and vendors, straining those critical relationships—and ultimately, jeopardizing effective procurement outcomes.

The Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA)’s utilities procurement team was experiencing these challenges first-hand. With such a large scope—GLWA supplies water to 40 percent of the state of Michigan’s population, as well as wastewater services to nearly 30 percent of Michigan’s population—it was becoming increasingly difficult to manage paper-based workflows. The time-consuming and error-prone nature of these workflows caused a lot of frustration for both internal stakeholders and vendors—a recipe for strained relationships. 

On today’s blog, we’ll dig into some insights from GLWA’s experience moving from administratively-burdensome processes to an eSourcing solution that prioritizes stakeholder relationships and vendor engagement—and how that transformed those relationships (and ultimately, the utilities procurement outcomes) for the better.

Paper-based workflows are a recipe for severed relationships

When procurement teams rely on pen-and-paper evaluation processes, no one wins. Vendors are tasked with printing binders of material, factoring in time for shipping, and worrying in the back of their minds that their bid could be disqualified because documents go missing or they miss an addendum or clarification. Evaluators, who may already be overstretched from the demands of their primary job, become overwhelmed with the administrative burden of flipping through pages and pages of information—which might not all be relevant to that particular evaluator. And procurement teams may feel more like nagging overseers than relationship-builders as they continually check-in with delayed evaluators to keep projects on track.

GLWA was in the same boat. With 21 buyers who oversee purchases that include numerous stakeholders and evaluators per project, and a vendor pool of more than 2,400 vendors, complex paper-based practices were no longer sustainable. Internal stakeholders were frustrated because evaluation times were long and contract statuses felt like a black box. GLWA was understandably concerned that these project delays and lack of visibility would put vendor relationships at risk.

Strategic sourcing software doesn’t have to turn processes upside-down

Strategic sourcing software has the potential to increase stakeholder engagement and improve vendor relationships by making the procurement process more transparent and straightforward. With so many projects on the go, however, many procurement professionals don’t have the time or the resources to dedicate to strenuous change management. 

GLWA was no different; they already had strong foundational processes in place but needed a way to execute their processes efficiently. After all, a more efficient and stakeholder-friendly process leads to more satisfied customers and partners. GLWA turned to Bonfire to digitize their existing workflow, from solicitation to award, and then through contract management and vendor relationship management. 

eSourcing empowers procurement teams to improve results

GLWA’s stakeholders and vendors were able to begin using Bonfire immediately without formal training. Vendors could submit proposals and keep related materials updated in a more efficient and cost-effective manner, and internal stakeholders saw evaluation times get cut by five to seven days. These efficiency gains alone left stakeholders and vendors more satisfied with the strategic sourcing process, but the benefits went beyond efficiency for efficiency’s sake.

With less time devoted to administrative tasks, GLWA’s utilities procurement leaders were then able to structure their buyers in more strategic positions so that they could be more effective in their jobs. Additionally, GLWA launched a small business vendor initiative, with the goal of reaching out to small vendors and bringing them into the bid process. Bonfire made it easier for GLWA to engage more vendors, increase their vendor pool, and manage relationships with those vendors. 

To learn more about how improved evaluation timelines and transparency with Bonfire’s eSourcing solution led to better vendor relations and buyer satisfaction at GLWA, read the full customer success story.

Behind the scenes at many public agencies, you’ll find technology that lags way behind the tech that even the average citizen carries around in their pocket.

For example, the master file at the Internal Revenue Service runs on code from the 1950s. The Baltimore police department relies on a 20-year old system for tracking and reporting crime. The San Francisco property tax assessment system runs on computers from the age of the floppy disk. 

These are not just isolated cases: in fact, seventy percent of the government’s IT budget is spent on maintaining legacy systems. 

The IT modernization challenge

Obsolete technology is expensive and time-consuming to maintain (to the tune of $13.6 million per year in the case of the aforementioned IRS system). Still, public agencies struggle to get the budget for modernization—and when they do, the IT procurement process is plagued by challenges. 

Obstacles to effective IT modernization include: 

• Outdated regulations that are out-of-step with the market 
• Long and burdensome procurement processes
• The complexity of decisions with many stakeholders

Given the rapid pace of technology change, governments must modernize or risk falling further behind. Key to this modernization is a more flexible IT procurement approach that can adapt to a quickly-changing technology marketplace. 

Making government IT procurement accessible for smaller players

The traditional approach to IT procurement is to put out a lengthy RFP that provides a list of specifications and asks vendors to demonstrate how they meet those specifications. 

However, this approach is time-intensive and complicated to navigate for vendors—meaning large incumbents often have a leg up over small companies. Ironically, when it comes to advanced technology, it is frequently these small companies who have the agility to refine a market-leading offering. 

For governments to engage more innovative small and medium-sized businesses, they need to channel some of that agility into their own procurement process. 

The agile approach can be implemented in different ways: 

• “Request for Ideas’ or other open-ended tendering formats to learn about a new market
• Structuring the RFP around the problem to be solved, rather than an exhaustive list of specs 
• Including pilots or iterative stages in the contracting process 

Flexibility through cloud-based software

The next significant step is leaving behind government’s traditional preference for on-premise software in favour of a cloud-based model of service.

This recommendation emerged from the 2018 White House Report on Federal IT Modernization, which called for an aggressive migration from legacy systems towards commercial cloud services. Why? Greater innovation, decreased costs, and dramatic service improvements for both agencies and citizens.  

The strain of keeping legacy systems updated and protecting against security threats has become untenable. In contrast, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools: 

• Require no infrastructure or dedicated on-site personnel
• Can be implemented quickly and right-sized to agency need
• Can be kept up-to-date with ongoing releases
• Can react quickly to evolving cybersecurity threats 

These features make it the more secure and cost-effective choice. 

The White House Report outlined various action items—from guidelines to policy changes— to enable agencies to more easily acquire and adopt Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools. But the authors also noted that it’s not all about policy and procedure.

 “An active shift in the mindset of agency leadership, mission owners, IT practitioners, and oversight bodies” will be required to realize the mandate of modernization. 

Ultimately, vendors deserve an equal playing field, citizens deserve modern services, and public agencies deserve to be empowered with the best technology for the job. By changing the approach to IT procurement, everyone can benefit from technology innovation. 

For more, read the GovTech eBook: Understanding Procurement Technology and How to Use It

Procurement is a hard job — but managing the procurement process with outdated tools (or no tools at all) is making it even harder. That’s the reality for 60% of procurement teams who rely on manual hard-copy processes for their bid and RFP process.  

Every team has a tipping point, after which the status quo becomes unsustainable. Read on to see if you recognize any of these signs on your team:  

1.  Paper cuts are an occupational hazard of your job.

2. Your office is running out of storage space for filing cabinets.

3. You have procurement software—but it’s so old that it only runs on a computer from the 1990s and only one person on the team knows how to use it. 

4. Your blood pressure spikes on bid closing day. 

5. More than once, you’ve debated the time on the clock with a vendor at bid closing time.

6. You have procurement software, but you spend more time in Excel than in the system. 

7. A vendor debrief can send your department into detective mode trying to track down scores and comments. 

8. You have procurement software, but nobody has logged in for months. 

9. Getting people to serve on evaluation committees is like pulling teeth. 

10. With all the email threads from vendors and evaluators, ‘inbox zero’ is a faraway dream. 

If you’re nodding your head to any of the above, it’s time to take a look at the evolving procurement technology marketplace. Modern sourcing software has adopted the same principles of user experience as the apps you use in your day-to-day life, resulting in an intuitive interface that is easy for stakeholders and procurement teams to learn and use. By digitizing and centralizing your bid and RFP process, your team can: 

• Eliminate paper and Excel completely (resulting in less time spent on paperwork, less storage space needed, and no risk of lost or misfiled documents)                
• Reduce timestamp disputes and bid closing chaos with a simple and straightforward online submission experience for vendors
• Improve collaboration, by providing a convenient online platform for evaluators to communicate on project progress, review proposals, and complete scoring 

Wondering where to start?

 Attend the webinar with NIGP: 

Making Sense of Procurement Tech:  a practical guide to digital transformation

With Patrick Moore, Senior Fellow, Centre for Digital Government

August 13, 2:00 pm ET

Much has been made of the ‘silver tsunami,’ which describes the looming wave of Baby Boomer retirements set to disrupt the public sector workforce in the next few years. Between 30% and 40% of state workers are currently eligible for retirement, with even higher numbers in local government. Meanwhile, most public sector teams (as many as 90% in some jurisdictions!) do not have succession plans in place for replacing employees or managers.

For procurement teams, which are often operating under strapped resources at the best of times, the impact will be magnified. The reality is that when veteran employees retire, decades of experience and institutional knowledge go with them.

Retention, training, and recruiting initiatives are valuable strategies to mitigate the impact of the anticipated ‘brain drain’ from senior staff retirements. However, these are long-term plans—and with nearly half of the public sector workforce eligible to retire today, teams need to start preparing now.

Sourcing software: a port in the storm of staff turnover

Transitioning your paper or Excel-based bid and RFP process onto a centralized sourcing platform provides several benefits to help manage staff turnover and retirements without missing a beat on your procurement.

1. Centralize bid and RFP activities in one platform.

All too often, bid and RFP information is stored in filing cabinets and locally-stored spreadsheets. When a staff member leaves, their teams find themselves putting on their detective hats to find project information, connect with the right stakeholders, or piece together FOI requests or audit reports after the fact.  

At best, it’s a time sink—at worst, it’s a source of risk for your procurement function.

Sourcing software provides one central platform to manage all bid and RFP decisions, across all procurement staff, in one place. Retiring employees can grant access to their colleagues to provide immediate visibility into vendor details, proposal documents, evaluator information, scoring, and project communication for all past and current projects.

As a result, procurement teams have the up-to-date information they need to pick up where their colleagues left off.

2. Do more with less.

Forty-two percent of government purchasing staff report that they are overworked—and the problem is likely to grow more acute as staff retire. In many cases, open positions are backfilled or go unfilled. Even if they are filled, the average hiring process in public sector takes 53.4 days, so teams can be expect to be shouldering an increased workload for some time.

Sourcing software helps procurement teams manage growing workloads by automating many of the tedious administrative steps in the process — such as manning the receiving desk, distributing proposals to evaluators by hand, or manually aggregating scorecards.

As a result, teams are able to reduce RFP cycle time by half, giving them additional capacity to keep up with increasing demands on their time.

3. Operationalize best practices for quicker on-boarding and training.

Every team has a ‘go-to’ person, who is relied upon for questions, gut checks, or reminders on how the formulas work on complicated Excel files. You wish you could bottle up their knowledge—but alas, that technology hasn’t been developed yet.

The next best thing is using a sourcing platform to operationalize best practices across the procurement team. Templates and drafts ensure that standard clauses and compliance language are always included. Staff can also access all past projects in order to learn from previous examples that yielded high value contract awards.

While new team members are learning, experienced team members can maintain supervisory visibility over bid and RFP projects. This helps team members learn the ropes more quickly, with full peace of mind that all steps are being followed correctly.

See Bonfire sourcing software for yourself

Join our upcoming webinar for a firsthand demonstration of how the Bonfire sourcing platform supports teams in managing capacity gaps caused by retirements or staff turnover.

WEBINAR: 3 ways eSourcing can address the transit talent gap

June 25, 2 pm EDT  

Best value procurement, a competitive process that prioritizes best overall value rather than simply the lowest price, is on the rise in the public sector.

In fact, a study of over 6,600 RFP projects found that the lowest priced proposal won in only 10% of all projects. Conversely, the most expensive proposal won 2.9% of time. The majority of projects fell in the middle, finding a balance between price and technical or qualitative factors in order to determine the best overall value (rather than simply the lowest cost).

Healthcare decisions are particularly well-suited to the best value procurement model because they must always consider patient outcomes above the bottom line. Many RFPs include factors such as service quality, experience, or clinician preference in the evaluation.

Especially when it comes to procuring cutting-edge technology or innovative solutions, procurement teams are beginning to replace the traditional RFP (which provides a list of predetermined specifications) with a problem-focused approach, which presents the challenge to be solved and gives vendors flexibility to propose solutions. 

The challenges of evaluating best value through paper and Excel

Best value procurement and other innovative methods deliver better solutions at a better price, which is good news for healthcare organizations and the patients they serve.

However it only makes procurement’s job harder. They must involve more stakeholders and ensure well-balanced and clearly specified criteria, while controlling costs and maintaining compliance to rules and regulations — and for many teams, they are doing it all over email, Excel, and paper.

While digitization is well underway in frontline healthcare, it has lagged when it comes to the administrative functions of the organization, leaving much of the RFP process to be conducted offline. This results in high administrative demands on procurement teams, as well as a risk of errors or delays in the process. The sheer amount of time it takes to conduct manual data entry and manage evaluators by email means that many teams have limited capacity to take on strategic procurement projects.

Three ways eProcurement software helps teams conduct best value procurement

Bringing the bid and RFP evaluation process online eliminates mountains of paperwork from buyers’ desks, cutting the amount of time spent on manual projects by half.

Leading eProcurement platforms go beyond efficiency gains to provide workflows and tools that make it easier to manage best value evaluations of RFPs. Here’s how:

1. Easy stakeholder engagement.

RFP decisions often depend on the input of several individuals across the organization, including clinicians, facilities managers, administrators, and others.

eProcurement platforms provide one online location to engage evaluators and centralize communication.

For evaluators, it means that they can log into one platform to find, review, and score relevant proposal documents at their convenience.

For bid administrators, it means that their inboxes are free from lengthy email chains, and their to-do lists are free of manual tasks like scorecard creation, distribution, and tabulation. With clear visibility into evaluators’ scoring progress and automatic score tabulation, bid administrators can focus on facilitating best value decisions, rather than managing administrative tasks.

2. Evaluation tools for efficient review of vendor information.

Bid administrators’ time is best spent on the difficult task of understanding stakeholder needs and properly balancing scoring rubrics — not on manually copy-and-pasting scores or checking vendor submissions for completeness.

eProcurement software platforms allow procurement teams to set custom weighted criteria, collect structured vendor responses, and automatically collect and tabulate scores, saving administrative labour at each step.

Evaluation tools automatically format large amounts of information, attributes, and specifications side-by-side for ease of comparison and scoring, so decisions are made with all the necessary information at hand.

3. Robust support for compliance requirements.

In a 2016 survey across Council of Academic Hospitals of Ontario (CAHO) members, 76 percent of respondents reported policies, directives, and procurement regulations as “major hurdles” to adopting innovation within their companies.

eProcurement platforms can’t change the laws that procurement teams must adhere to, but they can support procurement teams’ efforts by providing customizable built-in controls throughout the process. For example, online Conflict of Interest form collection makes it easy to ensure evaluators’ impartiality before they are granted access to proposal documents. eProcurement platforms also provide centralized digital records of every step in the decision to protect the organization from legal challenge and make it easy to respond to vendor debriefs.

Procurement teams have an unprecedented opportunity to provide value to their organizations through leading practices such as best value procurement. Healthcare-focused eProcurement software makes it easier to manage the evaluation of healthcare bids and RFPs.  

Sustainability is a hot topic for many public institutions, but the conversation is especially active in higher education, where students and faculty are at the front-lines of sustainable development research and practice.

In the Sustainability in Education report, one third of respondents reported that sustainability was a strategic priority for their institution, while nearly all institutions have a sustainability policy in place.

These policies and priorities can manifest in many different ways on campus: everything from curricular expansion in the field of sustainability, to community programming, to green-building initiatives.

Many administrators are also looking internally at the standard operating procedures of their departments, to examine where they could make changes to their own process to support their institution’s sustainability commitments.

What is Sustainable Procurement?

Sustainable procurement is the adoption and integration of ethical and environmental concerns into your procurement processes and decisions, while also ensuring that they meet the needs of your business.

Many higher education procurement teams are beginning to implement formal sustainable procurement initiatives. These can have a huge impact—after all, each procurement decision represents the opportunity for institutions to choose environmentally and socially preferable products or services for their campus.

Formal initiatives aside, procurement teams have an immediate opportunity to make the procurement process itself more sustainable by reducing the reams of paper that flow through procurement departments every year.

Procurement’s paper footprint

In an article for Inside Higher Ed, Eric Sickler wrote about a recent experience as a vendor submitting to an RFP for a major American university. He notes that despite the university’s stated sustainability commitment, the requirements for this RFP specified the submission of numerous identical paper copies, amounting to nearly 1,000 printed and bound pages.

The irony was not lost on Sickler, as he asked:

“Is your department — and the departments with which you routinely collaborate — really walking your sustainability talk?”

While Sickler’s experience deals with a particularly detailed RFP, the procurement process is notoriously paper-heavy. The State of the RFP, a benchmarking study of billions of dollars of public sector RFP decisions, shows that the average RFP submission is 132 pages in length. Considering that the average project receives five submissions, with copies for an average of four to five evaluators, a single RFP project requires a total of 2,970 pages of paper.

Bringing your bid and RFP process online eliminates the need for paper instantly, resulting in a more sustainable procurement process.

The environmental impact of a paper procurement process

Paper savings are not just about the number of trees being cut down! As this infographic shows, paper production also requires a significant amount of water and electricity resources. Consider also the CO2 emissions from the delivery and transportation of paper RFPs from your vendors’ office to your campus.

By implementing paperless procurement process, Bonfire clients have saved a total of 31 million sheets of paper, equal to:  

• 3,767 trees
• 1,695 MWH of energy (enough to power a desktop computer for 11,300 years)
• 13 million gallons of water
• 104.8 tons of CO2 emissions

Digitizing procurement: good for you, your campus, and the planet

Sustainability improvements are a good news story for your institution. However, the environmental benefits of digitizing the procurement process are merely icing on the cake when you consider the advantages to procurement teams:

• Significant efficiency gains, resulting 50%+ shorter RFP cycle times
• Streamlined communication with internal departments
• Clear visibility and reduced risk

Bringing your procurement process online is a win-win, allowing you to ensure alignment with your institution’s commitment to sustainability, while also improving the process for your team.

Read more about the impact of paper RFPs in The True Cost of your Paper RFP.

Controlling rogue spending is the most ubiquitous challenge that procurement teams face when it comes to their indirect spend, according to ProcureCon Indirect East. At the heart of rogue spending is a disconnect between procurement and the rest of the company.

When stakeholders resist the procurement process and ‘go it alone,’ they introduce risk to your organization and leave cost savings on the table.

For that reason, getting stakeholders engaged with the process deserves to be a top priority for your procurement team.

What’s behind poor stakeholder engagement?

There are various reasons that stakeholders may want to avoid participating in the procurement process. Realistically, some of these opinions or misperceptions are out of your control. However, one common concern which is well within your sphere of influence is stakeholders’ resistance to a slow, cumbersome, or difficult process.  

RELATED: 5 Step Guide to Better User Adoption

According to a 2019 report by ProcureCon Indirect East, one of the underlying issues here is that many procurement teams do not have the technology support to help them run a modern and efficient process, or involve stakeholders easily in the process. Too many teams are trying to get things done with only the limited procurement functions of their ERP, or no technology at all.

Challenges of using an ERP for procurement

There’s no question that ERP systems are powerful. However, they’re also notoriously complex. Even for seasoned users, navigating the system can be a challenge. For occasional users — such as a subject matter expert participating in an evaluation — the challenge is magnified. Furthermore, ERP systems are not built with the workflows to support collaborative decision-making, providing only limited ways of involving stakeholders.

As a result, teams either struggle through the evaluation process in their ERP, or forgo technology all together in favour or paper, Excel, and email. This makes the procurement process time consuming and prone to error, which doesn’t help with procurement’s outdated image.

Modular eProcurement software offers two main advantages: it is specifically designed for the procurement process, which means it is easy-to-use and has the flexibility to support more collaborative evaluations.

How modular eProcurement software promotes user adoption

“Modular cloud-based solutions provide stakeholders with an easy-to-use and easy-to-understand system that allows them the ability to get involved only when they need to be,” says Andrew Wolfe, a seasoned CPO and now principal consultant with Wolfe Procurement. “A modular system that is easy to use means great visibility and accessibility for team members at all levels, whether an executive role or an administrative manager.”

Modular eProcurement software employ the same principles of user experience that underpin mainstream consumer apps (such as Google Maps or Netflix), so the systems feel familiar and work like stakeholders expect it to. Modular software platforms are also very agile, evolving through direct consultation with clients to fit their process and serve their needs better. As a result, little to no training is required for occasional users to participate, a crucial advantage over ERP system.

“In modular sourcing platforms, we’ve seen that stakeholder engagement has significantly increased,” says Wolfe. “In some cases, adoption is above 98% within that process.”

Easier collaboration for better outcomes

When stakeholders can participate easily in the procurement process, it enables fruitful collaboration to take place.
“Whether a company has multiple ERP systems, multiple operating entities, or they’re around the globe in terms of physical location—you need to get everybody putting all sourcing activities in that single spot,“ says Wolfe.

Conducting your procurement in one user-friendly platform means you can:

• Ensure all stakeholders have seen and thoroughly reviewed supplier proposals;
• Include more stakeholder perspectives without increasing your workload;
• Collect and tabulate scores automatically, reducing manual steps and risk of error; and
• Ensure consistency of data throughout the full lifecycle of the decision.

This result is timely, confident spending decisions that drive better outcomes  — not to mention better stakeholders relationships throughout the organization.

Read more about the risk of trusting your procurement to ERP systems in some of our previous articles.

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

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

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

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

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

Laying the foundation for a strong business relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developing trust internally

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

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

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

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

Launching point for further innovation

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

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

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

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

Online procurement platforms like Bonfire have changed the way teams run their bids and RFPs: paper, email, and Excel are being replaced by a streamlined and fully online software that supports the entire procurement process, saving teams significant time by making the buying process easier, simpler, and more efficient.

However, when it comes to construction tenders, receiving valid bonds from bidding suppliers offline using paper can hamper your ability to get the greatest benefits from your platform.

These paper copies are not only time-consuming to obtain and submit on the vendor’s side, they add unnecessary complexity and prevent procurement teams from streamlining their entire process online.

Enter eBonding: an efficient, secure, and compliant alternative to paper bonds. Here’s how you can use Bonfire and eBonding to streamline your construction tenders online:

From paper to digital

eBonds are a recognized best practice. Simply put, eBonding brings paper bonds into a digital form.

eBonding providers offer a standalone online system where the parties to a bond can process their bonds in a digital format using digital signatures and seals. Vendors then obtain their bid bond as a PDF file, which has embedded digital certificates and can be verified online at any time during the time of the bond.

It is simple and easy for Bonfire users to use eBonds as part of their construction tenders:

• When creating your project and requirements for suppliers, indicate that you require digital bonds as part of a submission (this differs little from the instructions you’d provide using paper bonds)
•  You can choose to direct suppliers to a specific eBonding provider, or allow suppliers to choose their own (we would recommend exploring and vetting eBonding providers to understand their approach, functionality, and specific compliance).
• When setting up a construction tender in Bonfire, buyers can create an additional document slot for the bid bond during project setup (see below).

When the bidding vendor creates their submission, they upload their bid bond as a PDF into this document slot.

Once the project closes and evaluation begins, the buyer can then verify the bond with the eBonding provider and download an audit report as confirmation.

Benefits for vendors and buyers

With eBonding, vendors no longer need to rely on couriers or tie up staff time with the hand-delivery of paper bonds. Instead, they can submit their tenders and bid bonds from the comfort of their office, at the click of a button.

On the buyer’s side, eBonding allows procurement teams to run their entire construction tendering process within one online platform, eliminating hard-copies, boosting efficiency, and ensuring perfect compliance.