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Please provide a briefing on Bonfire Interactive (http://www.gobonfire.com/) including everything we need to know about their history, core product features, value proposition and product differentiation
Hello! Thanks for your question about Bonfire Interactive and their history, core product features, value proposition and product differentiation. The most useful sources I found to answer your question are the Bonfire Interactive website and Owler. The short version is that Bonfire Interactive provides a cloud-based platform for public and private sector procurement activities and differentiates their product by offering a unique combination of tools to facilitate sourcing, collaboration, evaluation, compliance, strategic outcomes, and efficiency. Below you will find a deep dive of my findings.
METHODOLOGY
To complete this request, I searched corporate websites, industry reports, trusted media sites, regulatory filings, and review sites. I have organized my findings below under the headings:
1) Overview
2) History
3) Core product/features
4) Value proposition and
5) Product differentiation
FINDINGS
1) OVERVIEW
Bonfire Interactive's founder and CEO is Corry Flatt and the company has about 10 employees. Their estimated annual revenue is less than $1 million. Their top 7 competitors include Coupa (previously ZenPurchase), Future State, Deloitte, Procurify, Tradogram, McKinsey & Company and Bain & Company. Bonfire Interactive's headquarters are located at 151 Charles Street West, Kitchener, Canada N2G 1H6.
2) HISTORY
Bonfire Interactive was founded in 2012 with the aim of providing sourcing professionals with software that included tools based on new technologies such as machine learning/AI and predictive analytics. The main goals were to facilitate workflow automation, collaboration, and make better use of available data.
In March 2015, Bonfire Interactive received seed funding for an undisclosed amount from two investors, FundersClub and Y Combinator. Shortly afterward in April 2015, Bonfire entered into a strategic partnership with a Canadian electronic tendering service, MERX Networks (a subsidiary of Mediagrif Interactive Technologies). MERX's Electronic Bid Submission (EBS), streamlines bid submissions on a secure platform and Bonfire's offering streamlines activities after bid receipt. Through the partnership, they integrated eTendering and eEvaluation tools that offered an end-to-end electronic tendering and bid evaluation solution.
3) CORE PRODUCT/FEATURES
Their core procurement solutions are packaged separately for their two target audiences, Public Sector and Business/Enterprise. Below is an outline of the core features of the cloud-based procurement product for both sectors, followed by a list of features for each sector.
• Bank-Grade Encryption to secure data
• Single-Sign-On for all users
• Vendor Communication tools
• Vendor Management (registration, documentation, compliance)
• Contract Management
• API and Integrations with other systems in the tool-chain
• Central User Control to manage users, roles, and permissions, at either project or department level
• ONLINE SOLICITATION TOOLS - including a public bidding portal that gives control of which projects are public and automatically matched to suppliers and which ones are private (e.g. for pre-qualified vendor lists or below formal bidding limits). Online registration and submission process that provides control over submission materials, compliance and incomplete submissions.
• STRATEGIC EVALUATION TOOLS - to balance technical requirements, strategic objectives, and pricing/cost through blended scorecards as well as track progress, consensus, and potential issues.
• SCORING TOOLS - also for evaluation, to facilitate data collection and record scores/comments, score qualitative and quantitative/pricing data with auto-scoring and optimization analysis and segment evaluation into stages.
• COMPLIANCE AND KPI TOOLS - to control submission requirements, due dates, block data access before close dates, track decision making and project execution and evaluate team performance against benchmarks at the project and department levels.
• PROJECT LAUNCH TOOLS - to receive requests and gather requirements/specs from client groups, map decision-making processes and manage participants.
• DATA COLLECTION - to collect documents, data fields, Excel files and extract and score qualitative and quantitative/pricing data from Excel with auto-scoring and optimization analysis.
• EVALUATION TOOLS - blended scorecards to enter specs, qualitative factors, and pricing.
• E-AUCTION - which includes Bonfire BidTables price and negotiation tool that allows cost-comparison side-by-side analysis across line items and Bonfire eAuction to run reverse auctions online.
• KPI AND INSIGHT TOOLS - to facilitate coaching and quantify team effort and impact against returns.
4) VALUE PROPOSITION
No explicit value proposition was identified consistently across Bonfire Interactive's marketing and communications. However, I came across several statements that could be used to represent their value proposition as they summarize how the product may add more value or "better solve a problem" for consumers compared to similar products.
The first couple of value proposition statements are from the Bonfire Interactive website, the first is provided on their home page, "The leading Sourcing Enablement platform.....easier collaboration, richer data, and deeper automation [to] transform your sourcing team." The following statement is from their "About Us" page, "Our clients win awards. We have 99%+ adoption rates. And most importantly, our clients continually trust us with billions of dollars of sourcing each year-from simple quotes/bids to complex $100M+ decisions."
The next statement comes from an accelerator profiling website, "Bonfire is a SaaS web app that acts as ‘mission control’ for public sector purchasing teams, streamlining their procurement workflow for better decisions in 50% the time of existing manual processes"
And lastly, the following comes from a business publication that announced their previously mentioned partnership with MERX, "Bonfire is an award-winning online evaluation tool that helps purchasers make better, stronger decisions on their RFP, bid, tender, and similar projects.....providing a 50% faster evaluation cycle and 95% satisfaction rates from internal stakeholders vs. using paper submissions and Excel scoresheets."
5) PRODUCT DIFFERENTIATION.
The above information on core product features and the value propositions hint at how Bonfire Interactive differentiate their product offerings. Also, their Linkedin page provides a good summary of how they differentiate themselves, citing that rapid technological innovation has fuelled a shift in procurement that has resulted in heightened sourcing scrutiny and a stronger focus on strategic procurement. As existing software includes basic bidding tools and "clunky eProcurement suites" that do not facilitate a focus on strategic outcomes. Bonfire seeks to address these short falls in its cloud-based procurement software by offering a unique combination of:
This is also echoed in a recent press release from Jan 2017 announcing that the University of Massachusetts has chosen Bonfire for their procurement activities because “Bonfire allows public sector teams like UMass to leap into the future of sourcing with a robust combination of efficiency and compliance, something that isn’t possible with older bidding platforms."
A comparison of Bonfire Interactive's product features compared to some of their closest competitors also confirms their edge in combining these particular tools:
- While their closest competitor, Coupa also focuses on streamlining sourcing and strategic outcomes, they do not emphasize the collaborative, compliance and evaluative tools that Bonfire includes.
- Another close competitor, Tradogram also lacks the tools for vendor management and collaboration as well as data tools to evaluate.
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SUMMARY
To wrap it up, Bonfire Interactive is a Canadian company that provides a cloud-based platform to streamline procurement activities and differentiates itself by providing a unique combination of tools to streamline the sourcing process, facilitate collaboration, evaluation, compliance, and strategic outcomes as well as reducing project times.
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