The Centre d’excellence en approvisionnement (CEA) FRANCOachat is a shared service organization managing the procurement for five French-language school boards in Ontario. As such, it is critical that they adhere to their member board’s internal policies, directives, the Broader Public Sector Accountability Act, and applicable trade agreements. Director Lori Letourneau and her team manage projects of all sizes in French or English, from large ticket items such as the construction of new schools, to technology acquisitions, consulting services, and anything in between.
Challenges
With staff members, evaluators, and vendors spread across a vast territory of nearly 70,000 square kilometres, the CEA FRANCOachat required a solution to assist them in reaching vendors, to facilitate projects, and to monitor compliance.
A few of the challenges they faced were:
- Paper-based process posed logistical challenge for bidding suppliers
- Lack of visibility into project creation and status across all stakeholders
- Manual processes carried significant risk of human error for outcomes
Solution
The CEA FRANCOachat sought a software solution that offered:
- An online portal that was free and easy-to-use for vendors
- Electronic evaluations, to enable evaluators to complete their work and submit scores anytime, anywhere
- Clear visibility into projects and detailed award summary reports at the click of a button.
They first implemented Bonfire’s Projects module to simply evaluate submissions. Soon thereafter, they began to post, receive, and award competitive bids and RFPs on the cloud-based platform.
“The Projects module gave us project tracking for our disparate needs. Free document distribution and submissions for vendors was critical. Electronic evaluations, the scoring analysis, award summary reports, and notifications have since become functionalities we could no longer do without,” explains Letourneau.
Over time, they extended their use to include the Contract Management module, managing over 1000 vendors and 500 active contracts on the platform.
“Bonfire has become the key to enabling data accuracy. Not only is it the gatekeeper to our projects, but it is used throughout the entire project lifecycle.”
“We needed a solution that would bring it all together. An online platform that was easy to use, supported our organization’s goals and growth objectives: providing visibility into the entire process.”
Results
The transition from paper submissions and Excel summary files was a journey. Throughout the process, Letourneau and her team have found the support from Bonfire’s Client Success team to be responsive and thorough.
“The team was quick to offer support, to seek to understand our unique business needs, and to keep us current on product development.”
Streamlining the procurement lifecycle in Bonfire has resulted in significant efficiency gains for the CEA FRANCOachat team.
“When we were receiving paper submissions, it could take up to two days to open 125 paper submissions, making sure nothing was lost and doing the preliminary loading of data. Now it takes virtually seconds to a minute to pull that report out of Bonfire.”
With the time saved from various administrative tasks, the CEA FRANCOachat team has been able to collaborate more closely with clients, driving greater value.
“The digitization of procurement allowed our team to focus on the needs of our stakeholders. We create value by engaging our customers through technology, and have become active participants in specification development and contractual discussions.”
Bonfire has provided CEA FRANCOachat the ability to track timelines, leverage automated reminders, report on insurance, on compliance, and provide a procurement outlook.
“This has been a win-win-win: across every segment of our vast territory, rural and urban alike, the number of submissions has gone up. Our member boards now have the ability to monitor and plan for every stage of the procurement process. And our buyers are focused on high value work.”