Bonfire
Smart Sourcing Decisions, Made Easy

Preparing and executing requests for proposals (RFPs) entails an extensive amount of time, energy, and more often than not, frustration. Corry Flatt witnessed this firsthand after spending a decade working at technology companies where he frequently issued RFPs and also responded to them as a potential vendor to prospective clients. Through this experience, he observed that the majority of organizations, when managing their sourcing activities, used complex Excel models, paper spreadsheets, or outdated legacy software—all of which lacked efficiency, collaboration, and robust analysis to provide any meaningful insights. Flatt recognized the need for a fast, agile, and flexible process to make procurement a seamless experience. He thought, there must be a better way. It turned out, there wasn’t. So, to address this void in the market, he established Bonfire.

Bonfire offers a cloud-based sourcing software designed for public sector procurement professionals, and the solution has proven valuable in the private sector, as well. Providing transparency, compliance, and a centralized location for collaborative procurement activities, Bonfire empowers CIOs and procurement teams to find the right vendor, source the best-value goods or services for their organization, and manage vendors in one unified, automated workflow. This results in teams being able to easily issue bids and RFPs, collect vendor responses, engage stakeholders to evaluate proposals, and award and manage contracts with vendors, completely online. The streamlined workflow, built-in communication, and data reporting at every step of the way helps to bridge the gap between procurement teams and CIOs. “Bonfire is particularly beneficial from the CIO point of view. It is able to shepherd in new opportunities, quite literally in the form of new partnerships with vendors, but also by granting teams the freedom to begin thinking strategically and working together in ways they haven’t been able to before,” says Corry Flatt, Co-Founder and CEO at Bonfire.

Today, Bonfire is used across industries, spanning municipalities, educational institutions, healthcare organizations, special districts, and powerful Fortune 500 companies. The company’s platform acts as an assistant, helping procurement teams stretch their resources and personnel to be able to do more with less. Clients have found that time previously spent on administrative tasks can be reallocated to strategic initiatives to plan for future procurement activities that positively impact the organizations’ goals.

Furthermore, because Bonfire is a modular system, clients can begin running projects in as little as four to six weeks. “One of the first things we hear from clients is that they need a system up and running quickly. People don’t want to, and can’t, spend time or money on lengthy implementations—we understand this, which is why we’ve designed our platform to be integrated quickly; Bonfire clients can start seeing results almost immediately,” remarks Flatt.

Bonfire can be used for simple bids or complex RFPs, from low-cost everyday items like office supplies to expensive enterprise software.

“We help organizations make better decisions in the RFP process by offering the most powerful tool on the market for analyzing vendor proposals and providing meaningful insights—through Bonfire, clients can make more informed decisions,” explains Flatt.

Procurement teams use the vendor-friendly online portal to post opportunities, manage Q&A, and receive submissions. They can then manage the evaluation online via custom-built evaluations tools for side-by-side comparison, price scenario analysis, and reverse auctions. Decision-makers can make spending decisions with confidence by leveraging functions such as auto scoring, cost optimization, and real-time dashboard insights. To put things in perspective, on average, clients save 12 percent of their procurement costs through Bonfire.

We help organizations make better decisions in the RFP process by offering the most powerful tool on the market for analyzing vendor proposals and providing meaningful insights—through Bonfire, clients can make more informed decisions

Personal care company L’Oréal reached a point where procurement transaction volumes had overwhelmed misapplied IT systems and manual business processes. As a result, procurement activities became tedious and vulnerable to risk. By implementing Bonfire, L’Oréal was able to improve vendor governance and fix a disconnected sourcing process by shifting manual, paper-based records to Bonfire’s centralized electronic repository. “Having all the supplier documents on one database allows us to easily manage 500 suppliers through one click of a button,” says Joe Anderson, the procurement lead for L’Oréal’s travel and retail division in Miami. With an improved supplier relationship, the organization was able to gain visibility into their vendor pool and streamline their process without adding additional resources. “We have more than doubled the amount of projects we’ve done since implementing Bonfire,” adds Anderson.

Bonfire holds a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 72 and has achieved tremendous growth through its 98 percent user adoption rate. Looking to the future, the company plans to leverage even more data from their solution to inspire new tools and functionality, and present smart insights for their clients. “So many solutions in the market are monolithic procurement suites offering a breadth of tools. Bonfire is unique because we are focused on a specific area of procurement—sourcing—and offer the depth of functionality required to truly align with the needs of clients. We plan to continue our focus here by channeling all the data we receive from within the Bonfire platform to develop new functionality that gives our clients deeper insight into their spending decisions,” concludes Flatt.