 All right, good morning, everyone. Thank you to those who are here in person and thank you to those who have joined us online. My name is Joanne Gunn, I'm the Chief Procurement Officer here for the City of Fort Worth. We are very excited to host this training and we're very thankful that you've joined us. We're excited about Bonfire coming online and that we're gonna be able to make it easier and more efficient to do business with the city. And we think that it's also gonna expand some ways to engage with the city and be able to show interest and do different types of work on different types of projects. So thank you for your time today. This video will be recorded. We will post it online. So if you have others at your work or if you wanna revisit it later, you'll be able to find that on our purchasing website that Derek's gonna show us. So thank you again. And with that, I'm gonna turn it to Derek Atkins. He is our Bonfire Implementation Specialist who's been helping the city as we start going through our Bonfire implementation. And he will guide us through how you can use Bonfire, how to register in Bonfire, follow in his presentation, then I will answer a few questions and provide you some of the frequently asked questions that we've received. And lastly, we'll have Gwen Wilson who is our Diversity and Inclusion Assistant Director over our Business Equity Division. Provide us a training and an overview about how the Business Equity Division works and how you can ensure that you're compliant with it. If you have any questions, please make sure that you raise your virtual hand. You can also type it in the chat. If you're here in person, let us know you have a question, we'll make sure that we get that asked. And lastly, if you have any concerns about using Bonfire, please make sure that you include that in the chat along with your contact information so we can follow up with you. All right, Derek, it's all yours. Great, thanks so much for that introduction, Joanne. And again, my name is Derek Atkins. I am the implementation manager here at Bonfire. And it's my pleasure to present it to you today. I'm joining you from my home office here just outside of Toronto, Canada. And we are a US-based organization. We do have clients throughout North America and internationally that are using Bonfire. So it's been my pleasure working alongside Joanne and the entire procurement office over at the City of Fort Worth. And we've been working over the past couple of months now getting the system configured, customizing it to meet their specific requirements, setting it up with the services and features, ultimately getting it prepared and ready for launch in January. And we've gone through various sessions such as these. It's been very well received. We have over 1,200 vendors that have already registered on the platform. And I appreciate the opportunity to present it to you today. Before we dive into the demo, I'd like to spend just a couple of minutes really summarizing how Bonfire can be utilized. We are an online e-sourcing strategic platform. We have more than 890 procurement teams throughout North America and internationally that are using Bonfire as their sourcing command center. Our client list includes many in Texas of those 890 that I mentioned. A large portion of those, probably close to 200 are based in Texas and many throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area. We allow the organizations to publish their current tenders and digitize the entire buying process. We prepare and build opportunities and solicit U.S. vendors to submit to these opportunities online. We'll receive and tabulate the bids, analyze and then ultimately evaluate and award the winning vendors. And speaking of vendors, we have more than 650,000 in our database. Our vendor relationships are excellent. For the most part, they do appreciate using the online platform. And you would basically register to gain access to opportunities, view and download your project details and submit your bid in minutes. We have various dashboards and alerts to keep on track of things. So with that in mind, I'll go ahead and share my screen. Now I mentioned we're online e-sourcing. So that means I've pulled up a web browser. I'm using Google Chrome. Any of the standard browsers will work. Chrome's my preference, but Edge, any other browsers should be fine. And then the first thing I wanna do is I'm going to Google city of Fort Worth purchasing and the first hit brought me to this page. So the city staff, the procurement office has really done a great job in building this page. This summarizes a little bit about Bonfire as to who we are and our plans going forward. How to register, we've got a link to the registration page. There's a training video that's available here. You can click onto this video. It's going to step through the registration and submission process that I'm going to demonstrate today as well. We do have a associated NIGP codes attached. So you would indicate during the registration which services you provide and I'll go through that in more detail. We've got this training session and any supports questions can be directed through Bonfire and I'll touch more on that in a moment and various FAQs. So that's the first tab, how to bid coming soon and about Bonfire. You can read more about Bonfire. This lists our top 10 benefits of using Bonfire as a supplier. So it goes through things such as time savings. You're going to save time in avoiding that administrative workload in printing and binding and assembling and delivering your bids. We've got fail-proof delivery. You upload it into the portal. Ease of submission. I'll demonstrate the submission process, how simple it is. Cost savings. So with the piece of mind of submitting online, you'll also experience some hard dollar savings no longer needing to print documents, deliver the documents. And that leads into environmental benefits as well. We do provide exceptional support to you. There's no hidden fees. It will be free to register and everything centralized in one spot. I'm going to pull up another tab on my browser and connect to city of Fort Worth, sorry, fortworthtexas.bonfirehub.com. So this is the production system that we've created, fortworthtexas.bonfirehub.com. I'll present this to you. This opened up to our open public opportunities tab. There is a message here. We are expected to go live 1st of January. We do provide a link to the current opportunities. That will direct you back to the Fort Worth website. Open public opportunities. This is where any project that the procurement office is running will be posted and listed below. It will show the status as reopen, sorry, as open or reopened. Our reference number, a project name with a link to project details under the action. You'll see a link to access the opportunity. We'll show the closed date and number of days remaining until closed. As the projects run through their life cycle, they will be marked as completed by the project owner and then move into our past public opportunities area. So in the past public opportunities, you'll see the status as either completed as well as completed and awarded. And you would still have access to that opportunity. You'd be able to view all the project details, download the project files. If it was awarded, there will likely be an award statement shown as well. On this page, we have a login. So that can be accessed through two separate areas. We've got a login slash register on the top right, as well as a login tab on the left here. First thing you'll need to do would be to create a new vendor registration. And we'll see a link to do that here. New vendor registration to create your free Bonfire account. We also have that link on the register page here as far as create your free Bonfire account. So either one of those will direct you to this page to register as a vendor. I'll go ahead and do that. So I'm going to create a direct test vendor account, I'll call it. I have gone through this exercise a few times. So I'm going to use FW4. I'll enter my email address twice. When I click create account, this will deliver you to a page showing success and you'll receive an email with further instructions. That email will come from Bonfire support. Here's the email just sent to FW4 and the Bonfire account has been created. You've signed up to be a Bonfire vendor and need to finish registering to complete the registration, just click this link. When I click this link, it directs me to our Bonfire vendor portal. Now each, I mentioned our client list, 890 clients throughout North America and many others in Texas. So if you are participating at other organizations opportunities and you're submitting to city of Dallas, text dot, any others that you wish to access, we're going to create two registration settings here. The first of which will be our global vendor record. Global, we're going to indicate the type of organization we are, number of employees, my contact information, my corporate address, et cetera. Then we'll be directed to the city of Fort Worth where they will be capturing additional pieces of information. And so the first part is to create that global record and I'll step you through each of the components of the global registration and then we'll switch over to the city of Fort Worth registration. So the first thing I need to do would be to create our password and I would use the same login and password, the same email address and password on any Bonfire system. So I'll go ahead and enter my password between 10 and 20 characters and then click continue. The first option I have is to create or join an existing organization. So if you have colleagues that have already registered in Bonfire and you're creating an account or you could join an existing organization or create your own new one. So those are the two options that we see below. If you don't want to join an existing organization, we can create one by clicking this link. Otherwise, there's two methods to join an existing organization. I could do a search for the organization name. If I know the name, it will do a search. If it matches my email address domain, I imagine these company names listed here, my colleagues likely are part of those. So if I search for spots brothers, for example, as an organization, it will find that organization and allow me to join as another employee of spots. So that's an option for you as well. We'll dismiss that message. And rather than joining an existing organization, I'll demonstrate how you would create a new one. So when I click create organization, there's a three step process. We're on step one. And step one is merely to describe our business description, enter our phone number and address. So I'll go ahead and do that. I own, I won, won the lottery, I wish. I own a small IT consulting firm. I'll enter my password or sorry, my phone number. Now this will be my corporate phone number and my address, I'll have it located just down the road from city hall. Here's a trick. If you wanted to choose the state easier, you can select your country first and then you'll see the state listing appear. And I just did, I started typing TE in it, identified Texas and my zip code. Anything with a red asterisk will be a required field throughout the entire system. So I needed to answer each question shown. So that was step one, save and next will deliver me to step two. And this is the business information. So if I joined in existing, this task would have already been done by one of your colleagues. They would have answered these questions as far as how many employees, my particular role in the organization, I mentioned I'm a consultant and it will reiterate the first, last name, contact email. That was step two. And then finally, step three is to indicate what locations you service. So in this case, I could choose the entire US by selecting this checkbox or the arrow will take me to either nationwide opportunities or I can choose specific states. So if I serve Texas, I would choose Texas and maybe there's a offer services in New Mexico as well. So I've selected two states and now go to settings. So I finished all three of these steps to create my global vendor record. Now when I go to settings, it's going to direct me to the Fort Worth, Texas site. Now here, we've got a three step process with an optional step. So the first step would be to view and accept our privacy policy and the portal terms of service. These are active links. So if you care to read them, this will open up to another browser window and you can read through our privacy policy and our terms of service return to this page and continue to step two. Step two, we'll pull in our existing account information that I've created. So it pulled in my phone number, my address. Now, if you had a regional sub location, you could update your address here. We're also collecting at the city several other pieces of information. So my company name, I called it Derek test vendor. If I have a DBA name, maybe I'm IT consultants. Maybe that's how I operate. So in this case, my vendor name is this. That's probably Derek test vendor Inc. And I'm operating as Fort Worth IT consultants. If I have a website, anything with a red asterisk is required. I would need to specify my tax ID number. Just enter it as a number. The next question is whether your organization has special business certifications. And in this case, rather than being a text entry, we have a choice from a dropdown. And this is related to MWDBE. So if I am a certified small business enterprise, if I do have another MBE status, if I'm veteran owned, women owned business, you can choose multiple here. So I've indicated I'm veteran owned, certified small business. The next question is whether you accept purchase orders and there's a Y or N, I'll say yes. And do you offer discounts for prompt payment? Are you registered as a legal entity with the state of Texas comptroller's office? If you're registered in another state, I indicated I service New Mexico as well. At which cooperatives do you hold a contract through? If you're in Texas by board or other, you can enter the name of the cooperative in this area. Next we have to choose our vendor types. So I would select each of those that are applicable. When I was registering my Texas consulting firm, I indicated I provide IT consulting. So I'll click the plus sign. You'll notice it places a button with that label above. What this will do is it will capture this as part of your vendor registration. And then if city of Fort Worth is running an IT project, they would be able to post it publicly as well as choose to send you a invitation to participate. A notification that we're running an IT project and perhaps you wish to review it and be a part of that. So there is value in adding your vendor types for all the services that you provide. And here's the list here. We've got construction, general projects and services, food services, IT, maintenance and repair, insurance, professional services, real estate and other. Okay, so you can pick and choose as many as you wish and then hit save. That saved our vendor details and step two is complete. We've got a check mark against step one and step two now and we can proceed to step three. Step three is our documentation. And we've got one that's listed as optional and one is required. The W9 is required. It does need to be in a PDF format. This provides further description as to what is involved. And it's a simple process to upload the file. I would choose the file from my network or from my desktop. Here's my form, my W9. When I click open and then click upload, it's sending it from my local computer up to the Fort Worth registration page. And there's the file that I've uploaded. If I uploaded in error, I can choose the actions to delete it and I can also download what I just provided. The next one is an optional step. The previous page I indicated I was minority owned or veteran owned. So I would likely upload a certification document as well. Same process, I'll click upload file, choose my file. I've got an MWDBE somewhere. I'll say this is my certificate for my status and click upload. We'll get a check mark and a green dot to indicate it was uploaded successfully. Now that we've completed that, our registration is complete. So I've got that indicator. We do allow for an optional commodity code to be entered. These would also help you to match future bid opportunities. I mentioned by choosing the vendor type, you will be notified of opportunities. This is just another way to increase the exposure of your organization so you're made aware of new opportunities that would align with the commodity codes that you serve. We're using the NIGP code set. That's pretty standard in Texas. So when I click on, if I know the code number exactly, I could type it in the class number and the item number or I could do a search. That's for the code. If I didn't know the code and I'm just doing a keyword, I indicated technology. So if I search for the word technology, it pulled up all the codes related to that word. So perhaps I provide digital imaging services. Microcomputers and server and mainframes. Consulting, there's my smart technology consulting. When I click the plus sign, it added the button at the top. So there's the code that I've activated on my account. And you can add as many codes as you need. I'll search for information. I think it's six, one, three maybe. Here's a bunch of other codes that include the word information. And you can see I've activated those. And again, so when a, well, let me finish and I'll come back to this. So the next choice is to notify me of any opportunities that match. That is like an opt in. So we have, in the US we have can spam regulation in that you have to opt in to receive emails. So that opts you in to receive those notification messages. What that means is that any organization throughout Bonfire that is running a project and have tagged it with these NIGP codes, you'll automatically receive a notice that this project exists with a link to the opportunity. So it just increases your ability to receive notifications. And here where I've uploaded or where I've connected the global record to the organization record, I have selected the US for these two states. And you can add more states listed here. Select as many as you need. And then continue to registration complete. So I have selected those optional commodity codes. I have success. So that was the two step process. Entered my vendor information, uploaded my documentation, selected my commodity codes. Now I can continue to Bonfire or access bid opportunities on the portal. So I continue to Bonfire. There's a promotional message. I can clear any bids that you respond to or have been invited to will now appear in this My Opportunities area. So that will build as you respond to opportunities as you're invited. This list will build. On the top right, we'll see a dropdown. Not sure if that's an arrow or a chevron or what that's called, but when I click on the download and access our settings, that's where I'll be able to upload a profile picture. I can update both my organization record with city of Fort Worth as well as my global vendor record. Organization vendor record, that's where I've got my local address. I've got all that information I've entered. So if I do become certified with special business certifications, I could add new ones to it. I could update my website address, change my phone number, et cetera. I could choose different vendor types. That's all within my profile. Under additional information, this will show us the vendor types that I've registered on. And then if I have an updated version of any of these documents, I could upload new versions of them. I could manage what I just created. I can delete them, I could download them from here. So again, that was through the settings, the dropdown arrow or chevron settings. Global vendor record, clicking this will allow you to go over to the global vendor portal, manage your organization. You can control and manage your staff that are listed there. I can update my corporate address. I can change the services that I provide through that link. I can change my name, update my email and password, upload a profile picture, which would appear here. I could even set a preferred language. Now the city of Fort Worth portal will be in English, but these headings would change to whatever language you choose here. And then time zone will default. They say for some reason we choose Chicago, but it will default to central time. So that's the settings, back in our portal. And then finally on this page, I wanted to show you our question mark. I mentioned earlier that we provide support from Bonfire to vendor community. And that is accessible through this question mark. And we've got one new article it looks like. So when I click this question mark, this will appear on the bottom left of every page. Clicking this question mark will deliver me and you would reference the vendor help center. When I select vendor help center, I'm going to see this most popular articles. We just went through our vendor registration. So if you need further guidance or help, you can click this link. Next I'm going to show you how to create and upload a submission. And that would be available through this link for guidance and help. How do I log in, et cetera? How do I communicate with a project owner? Those are most popular articles. We also have a vendor help center. I click that link to access vendorsupport.gobonfire.com and you can search for articles of interest. We're standard vendors. Here's all the articles and videos to help you understand what we need to do. We've got a bunch of articles, we have a bunch of recorded videos. Here's some videos. How to access supporting documentation, how to revise your submissions, creating a bonfire account, all that good stuff. So that's a great resource for you. If you still can't find what you're looking for, you're having technical difficulties, submit a support request. We operate from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday. And our support team, I'm sure they'll be able to help you. Typical response on a general business day would be 10 to 15 minutes for first response. So we'll get back to you very quickly to give you help. You would simply enter your email address, the subject, provide a description of the problem you're experiencing. I would choose bonfire as the product line, upload any attachments, maybe a screenshot or supporting documentation. And then you would submit and they'll be able, that will auto-generate, auto-create a ticket, a support ticket and they can help you from there. That link was available in our help center. You can also create a new ticket here and it delivers you to the same page. So again, that was through the question mark, create a new ticket. So that's our help center. Now I've created this on our Fort Worth, Texas. We have created and we noticed in the open public opportunities, there's no open projects. We're not launching until January for live real projects. We've created a test platform. We call it a sandbox. So I'm going to close this window. I'm going to jump into the sandbox environment. And that's at Fort Worth, Texas-Sandbox. This is for testing only. And I can see we have five real live projects listed here. We also ran some past public opportunities. These five have closed. And here's where I would log in. So I was logged into the production portal, the Fort Worth, Texas.Bonforthub.com. I'm going to log into our demo testing portal through this link. I'll log in as Derek Tussvender. So you notice that I wasn't registering on a separate page. I'll use my test vendor three. Okay, bear with me a second. I just want to check something. Yeah, so here's my story. So you'll notice I logged in as Derek Tussvender four. That's the one I created on the production system. I want to now log in to a different portal. So it's prompted me to enter that over again. So I'm going to use a different login. So bear with me a moment. I'll just get a different account that I'm logging in under. CW3 is what it is. I should do it. So now I'm logged in as Derek Tussvender. I'm viewing the open public opportunities. I still have access to our support. When I click view opportunity on any of these, I'll choose this storm drain improvements project. I'll click view opportunity and this opens up to our opportunity page. Every project that we run in Bonfire will have a similar structure, a similar layout, similar features and capabilities. So the first thing it's highlighting here is showing me the project name, a reference number. That's repeated above. It will show the project type. That's a label. It's an indicator to show what type of project this is. Status will be open because I accessed it in our open public opportunities. It's showing my open date, a questions due date and our close date. So I need to submit any questions that I may have on this prior to December 14th at 5 p.m. Clicking this link will direct me to ask a question. I'll come back to that. We also display those in a calendar view. So if it spans over a series of months, you'll see the shading will be reflecting the actual dates shown here. That's just an extra visual. Project description provides us a basic short score scope statement or description as to the nature of this opportunity. And in this case, it's quite simple. We're seeking seal bids for the construction of storm drain improvements at Thomas Place. We've got a list of important events. And here you can see we've repeated the open date to show you when it was posted. It repeated our questions due date and our close date. One thing that I've added here that I notice is a pre-bid conference being held. It's actually passed. So it was held on November 14th. This project has been open for quite some time. So if there is any event of this nature, perhaps a pre-bid conference or site visit or additional events would be displayed in this list here, you can read through the location and the description and then also view whether it is mandatory to attend or not. This particular one was not mandatory but recommended. Scrolling down, I have supporting documentation. There's three documents available to me to download. The first one is our bonfire submission instructions. We also have the ITB and a diagram. I can download each of these by clicking this download button. This is saving it from the Sandbox portal onto my local computer here. And then it opens it up as a PDF. I've got my computer to load it as a PDF. Here's the ITB. So I download it, it's saved it, and I've probably opened in the, why I've got mine set to open in my browser or open it in a PDF viewer or Adobe, whatever you use. And then there's a diagram. If there's a long list of supporting documentation, you can download everything in one batch by clicking this download all files button. And this will save it as a zip file. So there's our zip file and it consists of three files within it that are listed here. So those are the two options. Download individual documents in their original format or download all files in one batch as a zip file. That will allow me to read through our ITB, view the details. We were provided with a brief description. This ITB goes through all of the detail. So it will list the entire project details, including all the requirements, all of the information we need to send back, any attached forms or documents I need to fill out, any pricing sheets, everything that I need to return to you. It will be outlined what is needed in here. In addition, scrolling down, I can see the list of requested information. This will show us everything that has been built that we need to upload to complete our submission. So in this case, we've got two categories. We've got a proposal section and we have an appendices. Under the proposal, we're going to upload a bid submission page as a PDF. We'll enter a primary contact name, upload an Excel spreadsheet with our price submittal, enter a bottom line price as a number. And then three documents, appendix A is required, B is required, the MWBE is optional. So you'll see as to how many files are to be uploaded, whether it's one or many, one or multiple. We'll see the file type that we need to upload and whether it's required or optional. Next, we have our messaging section. If there is a public notice sent by the project owner, perhaps there is an addendum to the technical details. Perhaps there's an addendum with our questions being asked on this opportunity and our corresponding responses would be uploaded into the public notices area. The vendor, so that is in the public notice, it would be like one direction. So it would be a public notice posted by the project owner or the buyer as a public notice. The vendor discussion is a one-to-one communication between the vendor and the project owner. I had an ask a question button at the top of the page. That will simulate starting a new vendor discussion message and I'll need to provide a subject and a message. So if I scrolled way up to the top very quickly, now when I click ask a question here next to this questions due date, it will pop down to start a new vendor discussion. Hi, can you consider? We don't like this question, do we? Can you consider extending the due date? I am going on holidays. So I'm sure buyers often receive that message. I'll click send. That will track and send a notification to the main buyer that that question has arrived. Now likely what they will do is prior to that due date specified above, they'll gather all the questions and then before the close date we'll upload a public notice as an addendum with the responses to all questions. No, we're not extending the due date. Yes, we need cleanup of the site. I saw that other question on there. So that's how you can communicate and send messages with your questions to our procurement team. And then finally at the bottom, I can submit. I see I've got a submission here. Okay, so I'm going to prepare a submission. I would see a prepare your submission button. And okay, let me revert back. So bear with me a second. I'll go back to my sandbox. I'll log out as this test vendor. I'm going to log in as a different vendor. They had already done a submission. They had already asked questions. So let me try a different. Nope, they're not registered. I'll bear it with you. Send any questions through the chat. In the meantime, I would encourage you to go to the, pull up your web browser, connect to our website, Fort Worth, Texas. Bonfirehub.com. Click the link to create your free Bonfire account. In there, enter your organization, first name, last name, email address twice and it will proceed from there. I'll log in as a different vendor now. So I've captured, here we go. So now I'm logged in as a direct test vendor. I'll access that opportunity for the storm drain improvements. I can ask a question. So this is a fresh start. I've got a technical question. Please clarify drain improvements outlined in section 3.2. So I'm asking a question on the ITB itself. I want further clarification on one of the technical components of this project. And when I'm ready to submit. So perhaps I've received a response to this question. I've read through all the material. I've gathered my and prepared my response. That's where I'm going to prepare my submission at the bottom of the page. We have a quick training video to give you an overview of that submission process. You can watch that video on your own time. And I'm about to demonstrate that submission process. It's relatively straightforward. In fact, it's a two step process. So I'll prepare my submission. It will show me the official time as well as the closing time. I would need to finalize and submit prior to 5 p.m. So if I logged in December 15th at 4.50 p.m. and started working through this and had not finalized until 5, it's going to shut it down. You won't be able to submit. So for that reason, I would suggest make sure you provide yourself adequate time to prepare and finalize your submission. Here's my company name. Step one is to provide our submission information. This is what was outlined on the opportunity page and it reiterates it here. Step two at the bottom is to submit and finalize. And I can't proceed to step two until step one has been resolved until everything in step one is taken care of. This will be grayed out and I cannot finalize until everything here is taken care of. So I do need to upload a bid submission page. It is required and it has to be a PDF. One file is allowed. I'll click my proposal. Here's my proposal submission page. It uploaded a PDF. It gives me a green check mark and shows that the file was uploaded successfully. It is allowing one file. If I was to try to upload another file into this slot, it will respond. You may only upload one file. If you uploaded an error, it does allow you to delete that file, upload a new version. There we go. And it does have to be a PDF. When I clicked upload, it only highlighted my PDFs. It didn't highlight my Word documents or my Excel spreadsheets. Next is an optional data entry. We've got 2,000 characters. Well, I hope my name is not that long. Derek test vendor is my name. And I'll click save. So it saved my name and gives me a green check mark as well. Next is an Excel spreadsheet to be uploaded. And I've got samples here. So there's my pricing sheet. Bottom line price as a number. You'll notice it's a number, not currency. So you do have to be careful if it's, I would say over a thousand as the bottom line price. You do have to be careful with the number of zeros. If you're trying to bid 2 million and you enter 22 million, that might be a problem. So just be careful of how that is entered. Count the zeros. It does allow for decimal points. So if I wanted to put in dot five five. Next is the appendices. I've got various appendices that I could upload. There's attachment and another one. I uploaded the wrong ones. So again, I'll delete. Upload the correct attachment. So you can work through this. I've already provided that in my vendor registration, the certification document. So I could upload it here as well. It was optional, so I don't need to. Now that I've got all green dots and green check marks on step one. Now we notice this button becomes activated. And I am now just able to submit. As soon as I submit, it gives me a confirmation. This will show all the details. So the project that I responded to, all the requested documents and data that I've entered, it will give me a confirmation code as well. If I was having a support issue, if I wanted to check on the status of my submission, I could repeat report that confirmation code in a support ticket. I'm sure they could track it based on your vendor ID and the project name and everything else, but you could capture that. It would have already sent an email with that same information. You could resend the email if you click this, if you can't find it. I could also download everything that I've uploaded. So perhaps I gathered these from various parts of my network or different file folders on my computer. I can download them all in one batch as a zip file. This button will do that. I can return to our portal listing to see if there's perhaps other projects I could respond to. I could provide feedback to Bonfire about how awesome that experience was. I can also, up until the close date and time arrives, I would have the ability to revise my submission. So if I click this link to unsubmit, at any point prior to the close date, you'd have the ability to unsubmit. You do have to be careful if you unsubmit, you'll wanna make sure that you resubmit, right? So you notice when I unsubmit it, it's going to send a message to me to that email address saying you have unsubmitted just so you can stay on top of that. But I will need to submit and finalize to finalize it again. So perhaps I updated my pricing and I wanna edit that. I would come back in here, change my pricing, maybe upload a new version of my pricing submittal. I would delete that one, upload a new version of it. There's pricing two now. Now there's my final submission. So what that allows you to do is you could also get started and maybe you haven't finalized pricing. You can get started and upload everything else in the interim, come back to it, revise your submission and then finalize it by clicking this button. It will again show me my confirmation code. It's the same code number. All the new information that I've provided including the change I made. So that's the submission process. Let's return to our portal listing. There it is there. I now have this submissions tab at the top. This will show me any work in progress submissions. I don't have any. Here's one I've completed. And there's, I can view that one I just did. The one I just submitted on that date. And those that I missed. So these would be opportunities I've been invited to but didn't respond to. So those are the three statuses that I have. On the portal, this will show me all the open opportunities, all the past opportunities and that one I responded to which remains open. As soon as that closes, it would change the status. So that's it for my presentation. I went through the registration process. I went through viewing and accessing opportunities. And also submitting to opportunities. I encourage you to get involved and register at Fort Worth, Texas dot bonfirehub.com. And we're expected to go live next month. So with that in mind, I'll stay on the meeting here if any questions come up. And good luck to you going forward. Perfect, thank you, Derek. Are there any questions for Derek before we move to the next portion of our presentation? I did see a question related to access to the call recording. So I will share it. I'll probably process it by tomorrow. Perfect, great. And what we'll do is we'll post this on our website. So when we get the call recording, we'll have that on the Fort Worth purchasing website. He showed you the bonfire tile. If you go there, then it will be available to you to show to anyone who wasn't able to attend or if you wanna review it. So that's a great question. I don't see any others in the chat from those who are here in person. Do you have any questions? Okay, thank you, Derek. All right, so we will move to the next portion of our training. And that is really just to do and go over some of the frequently asked questions that we've received. So we'll pull up that PowerPoint quickly so that you can also see it. And then following this, which will be brief, then Gwen Wilson with the diversity and inclusion will wrap us up with her portion of the training which goes over our DVI program and how you can make sure that you're in compliance. Okay, let's see here. Okay, is that changing? Okay, great. So the first question that we've received a lot is if you're currently registered in the city's PeopleSoft system. So you've been a bidder with the city for many years. You're registered in our PeopleSoft system. Do you need to register in bonfire? And the answer to that is yes. So on January 1, when bonfire goes live, we will no longer notify using the PeopleSoft system. Everything will go through bonfire. So you wanna make sure that you register. He went over at those NIGP codes. That's very important because that's how you'll be notified. So if you provide plumbing, make sure that you pick the NIGP codes that are related to the services and plumbing that you provide. A really nice benefit of bonfire is that let's say that you choose five NIGP codes, even though you registered with the city of Fort Worth, other entities that might go out to bid for those NIGP codes when you choose the area that you want included. If you choose all of Texas, then you'll get notification, let's say the city of Dallas, who also uses bonfire. They go out for one of those NIGP codes. You'll get notified of that opportunity as well. So please make sure that you register and you include all of those. Very important. Will bonfire change the way that vendors are paid? So unlike bidder notification, we are not changing the way that vendors are paid. So currently right now, if you are awarded a contract, you have to sign up as a supplier in the city's PeopleSoft system. So if you are already registered as a supplier with the city or in a contract or being paid, nothing will change for you. If you're new to working with the city and you register in bonfire as a bidder, you're successful in one of those bids, you'll receive instructions from our vendor management team on how to register in our PeopleSoft system. It will ask you different questions. It was like your banking information so we can get you the money that you're owed. Also contact information and other relevant information so that we can get you paid. So if you're already in our PeopleSoft system as a supplier, you're receiving payment, you don't need to do anything differently and your payment will not change. So what if your company provides certain services like engineering, architecture and legal services that are covered by chapter 2254 of the government code? And those are services that are prohibited from being bid out competitively meaning we can't consider a price. Will those bids be handled in bonfire? Yes. Even though we can't handle or we can't consider a price, we're easily able to set that up in bonfire so that no pricing information is considered. So just like today when you're submitting your qualifications, you're submitting the plans, experience, resumes, you'll be able to submit all of that information through bonfire that will then be evaluated in bonfire to determine who is the most qualified and then there will be a negotiation on price exact same way that the process is run today. It'll just be digitized in bonfire instead of having to submit paper copies. Once we're registered in bonfire, if we're awarded a contract, will we have to register somewhere else to get paid? So yes, this goes back to the previous question of if you're new to working with the city and you don't currently have a contractor or not currently paid by the city, if you're an awarded vendor after we switch to bonfire, you will have to go through a separate registration process to make sure that we have all of the information to get you paid. It's a simple process and we'll send you all of the information and we have a team available if you need any help with that, okay? Will there be support if I have trouble when trying to submit a response? So Derek went over this briefly but I think it's worth highlighting. The answer to that is yes. So there's a lot of tools available. Of course, there's the information that's available on bonfire and ready form. You're always able to access that. Derek went over the teams that are available to help you if you're submitting during those business hours. And of course the key here is making sure that you're leaving enough time in case something happens and you need help. So if it's one minute until the bid closes and you run into an error, you're not gonna have time to get the help you need to get that fixed. And unfortunately that happens. It's the exact same thing as if we were doing the paper bids and you are zooming to city hall and you find out, oh, we don't have any parking spaces available and you have to circle and you miss the bid time. You have to have it submitted by that time. So it's very important that you start early, that you check your documents to make sure before you submit that everything's readable, that it was copied in, characters didn't change, now all the summits in Hieroglyphics, it can't be read. So give yourself time, put it in early, make sure you can problem and troubleshoot if there's any issues and that you have time to double check that everything is in there the way that you want it. Because once the bid closes, you can't make any changes and we are bound by what we received. All right, well, notices of solicitation still be published in the Star Telegram. Yes, so all notices that are currently published in the Star Telegram will continue to be published there. That's a state law thing, so nothing about bonfire changes that. The only difference will be instead of having the list where you click and it takes you to our PeopleSoft system on our website is you'll click and it will take you to our bonfire page where everything will be listed there for you. So that's the only thing changing there. Okay, what if I do not have access to a computer or I'm concerned about being able to use bonfire? So if you have any concerns about using bonfire, please let us know. We'd like to help work with you, find solutions for you, make sure that you're ready to go on January 1 so that we can do business with you. If you're in the chat, please make sure that you're including that you have some questions or concerns and your contact information so that we can reach out to you. If you don't have access to a computer, there's a couple of different options available to you. First, all of our libraries have computer labs that are open to the public free of charge. So you can go to any of our libraries with the exception of Rebe Cary, which is our children's library. To enter that library and have access to the computers, you do have to have a child with you. All of our other libraries though are available and so you can go into those libraries, use the computers and submit your bids there. Also, all of our community centers have a computer lab available. Community centers do have a nominal fee to use their services. So please, if you want to use that option, whatever community center is closer to you, if you reach out to them, then they can tell you what their fees are for the annual membership. Once you have the membership to the community center, there's no additional fee to use their computer lab. Lastly, how do we stay updated on when bonfire will go live and all of things bonfire? So we know that bonfire is gonna go live on January 1st, 2024, but please make sure that you're checking the city's purchasing page. That website will continue to be updated with additional FAQs that's already included. We'll also make sure that we're posting other resources available. So this training will be posted as we have other resources that are available to you there. We'll make sure that those items are posted. So please make sure that you're checking back to the purchasing page because that will keep you updated on the updates that we have. You're also always welcome to reach out to our staff in the purchasing division. Please just give us a call. We're here to help and we wanna make sure that everything goes smoothly for you because ultimately we wanna see your bids come through so that we can do business with you. So that is all of the questions and answers that I have before I turn it over to Gwen. Are there any other questions? None in person. If you have any questions that you can have after the chat, I will turn it over. Oh, I'm sorry, do you have one question? Yeah, I need to share. I actually brought that to Derek. Derek, do you have one question in the audience here? So their question was, is there a way for themselves to limit the notifications they get to specifically one? So they sign up for one of the IGD codes. They only wanna receive notices from the city of Fort Worth or they'll be able to limit it in that way. Yes, I didn't go in depth into the global vendor record settings, but you do have the ability to extract and pick and choose where notifications are coming from, who's to receive them. So for example, if you had multiple staff members registered under that organization, you can choose who is to receive those notifications, et cetera. In the material that I'll share with you, including the call recording, I can send you and forward details on that to answer those questions as well. And is that something you could cover maybe in about five to 10 minutes here? Is that something you can show? Yeah, I'll see if I can find it on our external site here, yep. Okay, perfect. So while he's looking for that, any other questions? I think that'd be beneficial for everyone to be able to see, okay? So we'll have you, Derek, share that quickly and then we'll go to Gwen following that. Ah, okay. Thank you, Gwen. Bear with me a second. I need to plug in my headset again and I'll go ahead and share my screen. I'm still logged in under Derek test vendor. When I select settings and then I'll choose the global vendor record and I didn't go into this earlier. So when I click manage my organization, this pulls me into our account details page which is just my email address and password. Here's the responses I gave earlier when I initially registered. Here's the commodity codes I selected. Here's our locations that I've chosen. So I could add new states, I could add other countries, et cetera. Here's our time zone settings. Default will default to the organization that I registered under. Manage users, that's where you would allow other staff members to join. So I could invite them to participate as well. So I'm the, maybe I'm the president of the company. I registered my first bonfire account and I want my colleagues to be invited. I could send an email address or enter their email address and send them an invitation. When I registered, we saw those two options to join an existing organization. One was through the domain matching option. So I could turn that on, enter my email domain. In my case, it's go bonfire.com. I could allow my organization to be discovered if someone searched for the company called test vendor. Now it would allow that to be discovered. And then here's where I can manage who's joined the invitation I've sent, who's registered under my system. And then here's the coming to the question that was just asked on notifications. So we can manage your notifications by a recommendation engine. And then individual opportunities. Now to restrict it to one specific company, I might have to take that further in depth. Those are two settings that we have available here. Let me reach out to my vendor manager to provide further clarification on that. And I'll get back to you as soon as I can on that one. Okay, if everyone's ready, we'll go ahead and get into the business equity program ordinance compliance training. Again, I'm Gwen Wilson. I'm the assistant director over diversity and inclusion department, the business equity division. And in our division, well, what we're gonna discuss today, we're gonna talk a little bit about the ordinance and compliance and terms and conditions, just a few violations, sanctions, goal setting, bids, evaluation and closeout and also we have a vendor scorecard that we'll mention briefly. And please forgive me, I have a slight cold or allergies today. So hopefully you all can understand what I'm saying to you. Okay, just to give you a little background, our department is made up of four divisions. We have administration, business equity, civil rights enforcement and municipal equity. And so on the business equity side, we're dealing with capacity building or minority and women-owned businesses. On the civil rights side, we're dealing with employee discrimination and things like housing discrimination and so forth. And then on the municipal equity side, we're looking at ensuring that there's equity throughout the communities. For example, communities having decent sidewalks and other necessities throughout the city that there's equity there. These are a few boards that our department is a member of. That's the Human Relations Commission, the Mayor's Committee on Persons with Disabilities, Business Equity Advisory Board and our Diversity and Inclusion Employee Committee. Now we'll get into pretty much the meat of the program. In 2020, the city had a disparity study done. And from the disparity study, this is how we were able to come up with the requirements of our business equity ordinance. Through the study, it found that there was inequities or disparities within our procurement process as we look at contracts being awarded to minorities and women. So therefore, because of that, we have a race conscious, we set race conscious goals. In order to be able to do that, you must have a disparity study that shows proof that there is disparities within your procurement and you must have a legally, to have a legally defensible program. Now, also the disparity study defined our marketplace as well for us, which is six counties, Dallas, Denton, Johnson, Parker, Tarran and Wise counties. Basically that's saying that that's where the city spends most of its tax dollars with minority and women on businesses. Our annual percentage that was defined by the disparity study is that we should be doing at least 25% of our procurement with MWBEs or minority and women on businesses. So the study set these goals for us. We have an annual goal of 25%, but it further just aggregated the data to show by ethnicity, the percentage of businesses within our marketplace. So we show 9% of Hispanic businesses located there as well as 2% Asian, 7% African American, 1% Native American and then the 7% Carcassian women on businesses. Now, in order for us to count any dollars that we spend with these groups, they must be certified by third party certification agency that's approved by the city. And these are the agencies, the NCTRCA, the Dallas Fort Worth Minority Supply Development Council and Women's Business Council Southwest and the NTECH stock. So these are the agencies that we accept certification from. Now, I wanna talk briefly about our business equity ordinance, but those of you who may have had that have legacy contracts out there and when I'm talking about legacy, I'm saying contracts that were effective prior to January 1, 2021, we refer back to the old ordinance. So the difference between the old ordinance which is to your left and the new ordinance which is to your right is that the old ordinance had four separate programs. In the new ordinance to your right, we have one program is MWBE and it's narrowly tailored. So when we talk about narrowly tailored, we're saying we narrowly tailored it to one program which is Minority and Women's Business Enterprise. If you look to your left, we had four programs. We had an MBE program, then we had an MBE African American program. We had a small business enterprise program which covered architecture and engineering and with the small business that was race neutral. So according to the disparity study that was done prior to the new disparity study, there was no disparity in the architecture and engineering area. Now, if I look back at where we had specific goals to African Americans, that was professional services as well, but it did not include A&E. And then we had a Minority and Women's Business Enterprise program which covered goods and services. So we go down to the next square. We look at the six counties that's still applicable in the new ordinance. What we have added is in order to grow capacity, we have added what we call a significant business presence program, which includes those vendors must be located within the six county marketplace to count or we have another option which says that if a vendor has a satellite office located within the marketplace and has been there for 24 months, it must show proof of a lease or purchase and at least 20% of their workforce is based in the marketplace. We can consider that vendor in our program as well. We can count their participation. And then the third option that we put out there was if a business gets business receipts greater than $1 million for work done in our marketplace. So they could work Dallas Denton, Johnson Park of Tarrant and Wise Counties as long as they've gotten receipts greater than $1 million since January 1, 2013, we will be able to count those vendors as well. But again, they must be certified by an agency that's acceptable by the city that I mentioned in the prior slide. And they must show proof in order to be considered in the significant business presence. Okay, when we look at the next square, it shows you from those four programs, we had specific goals for each one of these programs in the old ordinance. Now in the new ordinance, again, we have one goal which is 25% annual goal. But even though we have these numbers disaggregated by ethnicity, we make every effort to try and meet these numbers. For example, Hispanic 9%, this year we were successful at doing 9.84% with Hispanic owned firms. I mean, in fiscal year, 22, 23. So we try to meet or exceed these goals by ethnicity as well. These goals add up to the 25%. In the next square for the old program, any project that was $50,000 in a penny, greater than that, then it was applicable to a goal. Meaning that any project greater than 50,000 in a penny had to come through the business equity team. And we would assign a goal to the project. Now in the new ordinance, any project greater than $100,000 applies must come through our office. That includes change orders and amendments. So any bids out there greater than 100,000 and above, we will put a goal on it if applicable. And then down here at the last one, we look at this. The old program was a subcontracting program, but we did have a prime program element under that, but it could only go up to 100,000 for professional services and 150,000. There was a cap for MWBEs to bid as primes, which is not good. I mean, that's a very low figure. We changed that in the 2020 study, changed that. Now, any prime business equity firm can bid on a contract regardless of what the size is and can count their self-performance towards the business equity goal. The reason I share these two things with you, if there's legacy contracts out there prior to 2021, we must still comply to the old ordinance on any legacy contracts. Okay, again, projects with a total value of 100,000 and above are applicable to a business equity goal. Okay, let's talk about goal setting. These are questions that come to us. This is internally and externally. How do you determine what the goal should be? Who is responsible for establishing the goals? And what if I don't agree with the goal? I cannot meet the goal. Well, the business equity division, we have what we call a business equity management system that we work out of. And from that system, this is where our goals are set. Now, let me go back. Now, like I said, our new goal type is MWBE because we have a narrowly tailored program, but we also have these in here for the old ordinance that we may have to refer to, like for example, the MBEAA, which was a professional services. If that project was in place prior to 2021, we still have to comply to that ordinance. Okay, here's where we do our calculation. We look at the work scopes and we do the goal calculations from the work scopes. So therefore, say for example, here, we got a work scope that included concrete sidewalks, driveways, wheelchair ramps, et cetera. Then what we would do, what the system would do, we would enter in that work scope. The system would go down here to the number of firms. It would look at how many MWBE firms are within the six-county marketplace. And it says they're 64. And then it says in total, how many vendors that's minority and non-minority are within our marketplace? That's 143. So it uses the numerator of 64 and the denominator of 143 and do a division and we come up with 44.76%. So my point here is that our business equity team, we're not just making up these numbers, we're using data from the system. Now the system is pulling data from the Census Bureau and also the NCTRCA database. When we had the disparity study done, this is the resource that the disparity study pool from, but they also looked at our six counties. It did not just pull all of Texas or all of the United States. It pulled strictly from our six counties. And this is what we pull from. So that's how we're able to determine, when you hear the term availability, we can only set a goal for what's available. We cannot decide, well, I wanna set a 50% goal. That is not legally defensible and we would not do that. Okay. Who is responsible for setting the goal? Again, the business equity division or we call ourselves DDIN. So when you see that, we're talking about the business equity division. But we also collaborate with the departments. We expect them to send us a cost estimate or a specification. Again, we enter these in by line item. We upload them by line item and then the system does its magic and gives us a calculation. Now goals are project specific. They're not by line item. It's project specific. It calculates everything on this sheet and what the average comes out to, that's what we put on the document. That's the goal that we set. And then the goal is advertised in the proposals accordingly. Okay. Also included in your bid spec should be your instructions to bidders about the business equity goal. It should include what the goal is if a goal has been set. There are times that we don't set a goal. The good thing about this instructions to bidders about the business equity goal form is that it gives you the link to the business equity ordinance. It gives you the link to any reports. I mean, not reports, any forms that you need to fill out. Just so you know this form, this instructions to bidders form was created in conjunction with the purchasing department. The original form we had was too difficult to read. So purchasing was very kind in helping us put this form in a way that it was very easy to read. There's three pages to this form. Again, one of the things to remind you is that, and this will, the good thing about bonfire is because we used to require you to get a receipt from purchasing the vision. It's evidence that they receive your documentation. Now with bonfire, we don't have to worry about this manual receipt thing or whatever we can get it right from bonfire. So that's a great change that we're looking forward to. You take some of the manual labor out of this process. Again, this form gives you the links to any forms that's required to be filled out by business equity. These forms will be in the bonfire system as well as on our project resources pages. This is the second page, it gives you more information. It gives you frequently asked questions but it also gives you information about violations and sanctions if you're not, if you do not comply to the business equity ordinance. And this is a look at our project resources website. But like I said, the good news is these forms will also be on bonfire. Now, what if you don't agree with the goal or cannot meet the goal? There are three options that you have if you don't agree with a goal. As a vendor, you can complete a good faith effort form and provide supporting documentation. As a contractor, you can fill out a contractor prime waiver form if you plan on doing anything. That means if you're planning on doing everything, that means that you're not going to buy anything from anybody, you have an inventory and you're not gonna subcontract any labor. So in that case, you can do a prime waiver. And then we have a joint venture that we really, really encourage larger in size corporations to partner with MWBEs. We encourage MWBEs to joint venture with each other. So this is an area where we really encourage joint venturing. Okay, now I'll just mention briefly about a good faith effort because a good faith effort is not an easy thing to do. So we really encourage you to try and meet the goal because you gotta fill out paperwork. We're gonna review that paperwork and it's gotta meet the requirements of the ordinance. So what constitutes a good faith effort? The bidder cannot meet the goal or the bidder can meet a partial goal. So if we put a 15% goal out there, you say, well, I can meet 7% but I can't meet the other 7%. You still have to do a good faith effort. Okay, in order to be compliant to the ordinance, vendors are required to request a listing of certified firms from the business equity division. That link is also listed in the instructions to bidder's form and they must complete all the highlighted areas and we have links in there for you to look up the NAICS code or product code and give us the description. That helps us to give you a meaningful list, meaning that the list of vendors who are certified in the areas that you are trying to pursue. So we wanna make sure that we give you certified MWBEs. And by the way, we're pulling those listings from the agencies that we've approved to provide this information to us. And so the business equity will generate a list based on the information provided and we will send it back to you. Oops, that's a second. Okay, now this is what a certified listing form looks like. Say for example, you requested environmental remediation services on that form, then we will provide you the listing back with the names of the vendor and the contact information to reach out to those vendors to let them know that you're gonna subcontract work out. We ask that you allow us at least two business days to get this listing back to you. The listing is good for six months. And we ask that a vendor verify with the DVIN. If you're wanting to use a vendor that is not on this list, you need to come back to us and verify that they qualify. Okay, here is a solicitation sample. You don't have to use this sample, this is an example that I'm giving you. Basically, you're telling the vendor that you're bidding on a project and when it's due back to the city, you give them the name of the project and when I'm saying you're sending this solicitation out to the vendors that's listed on that vendor listing that I just showed you on the prior slide, you're gonna give them the detailed scope of work that you're planning on subbing out. And then here you're gonna list the description and so far materials or whatever, they will respond back to you by returning you to you a price quote. Okay, once you get all of this information, now one thing I caution is that if you're looking for it to sub out work to a concrete vendor, you would not send out this solicitation to someone that does not do concrete. You would only send it out to vendors on that list that fell up under that NAICS code. Let's see. Also down here at the bottom, make sure that you provide the vendors the links to the plans and specifications so that they can see what is it that the city is doing in totality or bidding out in totality. This 10 days right here I wanna remind you is that you must contact the vendors from that listing at least 10 days prior to the bid closing date. If you contact them nine days prior to the closing date, you're in violation and your bid is considered non-responsive. So it's important to remember that 10 days, you can go 11 days or 12 days, but you must notify the vendor in advance. Okay, good faith effort checked list. This is a form that you fill out for a good faith effort. You follow all the instructions and also on the good faith effort form, you must list the business equity firms and the non-business equity firms. You must make sure that you provide the same scope of work to all firms. You shouldn't have a separate description of the scope of work for the business equity firms that you have for the non-business equity firms. Again, you must solicit at least 10 calendar days prior to the bid opening and provide plans and specifications to the vendors and add supporting documentation with your good faith effort form when you send it back to us. Meaning when you return the form back to DBI in, you must make sure you attach all the required supporting documentation. And this just kind of gives you a checklist of what's included in a good faith effort documentation. So you need to make sure you do this checklist. If you reject any MWBE quotes, you must provide an explanation and an affidavit as to why you rejected it. We may ask you for copies of all your quotes that you sent out for that particular item. Okay, here we're saying that anytime the business equity division assigns a goal on a project, it must be advertised for at least 21 days. So you have plenty of time to meet that 10 day requirement to contact your vendor, your MWBEs from the listing. And then again, we mentioned about the 10 days down here prior to bid closing date. Okay, this is an example of an email log that you can use as supporting documentation with your good faith effort that you send back as evidence to our group that you did your best effort to try and get inclusion. This is the good faith effort email. It kind of shows who you sent it to and so forth and what was it you sent it to them for. Then we hear it's an example of a phone log, a FATS log as well. This is a confirmation sheet from a FATS confirmation. Now let's talk about compliance to bid specifications. In the case that you're gonna meet or exceed the stated goal, you must obtain, you must complete a utilization plan form and sign letters of intent must be received from both you, from both the contractor and the subcontractors. So you must get signed letters of intent and return that back to the DBIN office. Now, if you're doing a good faith effort, again, we've talked about that. You gotta make sure you follow the good faith effort. States checklist and rules before you submit it back. We will review it. It will be deemed responsive or non-responsive. Now here to the third square, we're looking at good faith effort form and a utilization form that goes back to if we set a goal for 15% and you say I can only meet seven, then you need to fill out a good faith effort as to why you didn't meet the other seven. You also have to provide a utilization plan with signed letters of intent from both the offeror and the subcontractor. Again, here you must have attained a listing from our office, from the DBIN office at least 10 days prior to prior to be at opening date. Okay, let's look at low be at a best values. Here, we're telling you know that your utilization planning letters of intent and required documents must be received in our office no later than two o'clock p.m. on the third business day after the bids are opened. What we suggest to you is that what we recommend is that you provide this information at the same time you submit your bid. That gives us time that if you made a mistake, you still have three days to correct that mistake. If you wait to the third business day at two o'clock to send in your information and it's correct, it's being non-responsive and we ask that purchasing move on to the next bidder, to the next lowest bidder. Bidders must detail all subcontractors. The contractor intends to utilize in its performance of a contract. So on that utilization plan, you got to list all your subcontractors you plan to use, minority and non-minority. Again, if you do not timely submit required documents should be non-responsive bidder. And we ask that the next lowest bidder submit their required documentation. The process goes in cycles. If they can't do it, we go to the next lowest bidder. Okay. The DVIN division, what we do is we look at all projects again over $100,000. And we determined that they're responsive to the business equity goal requirement. So they're non-responsive. So if you address the goal, we deem you responsive. If you ignore it and don't address it at all, it's non-responsive. You do a good faith effort and don't meet all the requirements. You have two choices. We can either deem you non-responsive or you can find an MWBE to meet the goal. Because at that point, you don't have enough time to go back and do a good faith effort in three days. And over here to your far left where this X is, we used to the business equity evaluation used to be part of the point system. We're not part of the point system anymore. We just look at responsive, either you're responsive or you're non-responsive. Okay. Change orders and amendments. Change orders and amendments are applicable as well to $100,000 and above. If there's a change order or an amendment over $100,000 we're going to, it's applicable to a goal. There is the opportunity to wave it under the circumstance where you've already got someone doing the work. We're gonna be reasonable. We're not gonna say, hey, stop that person doing the work and you're gonna meet this goal. So there is a reasonableness in what we do. We have the opportunity to set a goal or we will ask the contractor, do you want to do an acceptance of previous commitment form? Meaning that if you accepted the original 15% goal that we assigned to the project, then you can keep that goal and we just move on. You sign the acceptance of previous MWBE commitment form and we just continue on with the 15% goal. Excuse me. And with any goals or anything like that, I'll attach all supporting documents even though it's a change order and an amendment, we still have to have the quotes and estimates and so forth if we're gonna assign a goal and then the department send that information to us. Okay. Let's go to contractor close out. We expect the contractor to let us give us notice of final payment that must be done electronically into our B2G now system, management system. Once we get that information online, we review your notice of final payment, we look for compliance and so forth, look at the guidelines, look at the ordinance and the prompt payment act and all of that stuff to see if you've been compliant to the ordinance. And then we look at, we'll either talk to the project manager, usually we get a green sheet, but if we don't get a green sheet, we'll reach out to the project manager to find out if the project is closed and if it's compliant. One of the things that I mentioned in this next bullet, but we're gonna talk about it later is evaluation scorecard. So I'm gonna skip this bullet for right now, but if the contract close out procedures compliant, we will close out the contract in good standing and include any comments in the system and attach any necessary documents. Okay. If there is a discrepancy in the system, then we have to reach out to the PM, but first we're gonna notify the contractor to review the amount that it gave us and to review the documentation and make sure they gave us the correct documentation. So once we contact both parties, if it's determined that the contractor failed to meet the business equity goal or there's a material breach of contract, there may be sanctions applied. And then we will note any of the findings and recommendations for improvement and then close out the contract as non-compliant. Now, sanctions may be imposed in accordance with the program and the ordinance. Now, when we're talking about sanctions, violations and sanctions, and usually in your first offense, we're gonna send you a warning letter. And many times a warning letter is gonna come if you're not reporting the payments that you're receiving from the city or if you're not reporting the payments that you're paying to the subcontractors. So we're constantly auditing the system. The system has an automated notification to notify you that you need to report within 30 days and then it notifies you again in 60 days, okay, you still need to report. After that 60 days, you may get a warning letter from us. And it tells you here what the consequences could be of getting a warning letter. It may impact bitter evaluation scoring on future city bid opportunities for up to 12 months. Okay, if you continue to violate, it gives you the progression of the letters. You'll get a non-responsive designation and then this could prevent you from bidding on contracts up to six months or until compliance is met, whichever is earlier. Then we have a one-year debarment and then we have a three-year debarment and usually you just got really egregious behavior to even get a one-year debarment. Okay, the scorecard coming soon. This is something that we're working on right now and what we will be doing is giving a rating on the vendor projects. It's a project by project basis of how well you're complying to the business equity ordinance. This information will be made available to all the departments to review when they're working on evaluations and so forth. We give a rating of A, B, C, D, excuse me, D and F, same as in school. And so we have a number system that puts you in if you fall in between 35 and 40, you and A. If you fall below 20, you're an F. So these scores will be made available to all of the departments as to how a company is performing and complying to the business equity ordinance. And these are resources. Again, we have our business equity ordinance that's on our website. This is the O ordinance that you can refer to if you have legacy contracts. This is our diversity and inclusion website that gives you a full overview of our program. And then again, we mentioned the forms and the projects resources website, but also once we roll out bonfire, those forms will be made available, excuse me, made available on bonfire as well. Okay. Thank you so much for your time. Great, thank you, Gwen, appreciate that. Are there any questions for Gwen before we wrap up? And from the audience here, any in the chat. Joanne, I did find an answer to that question earlier and it's just something I missed. Oh, okay, great. If you'd like, I can share my screen again and demonstrate where that was. Sure, that'd be great. Okay, here's where we were. I'm logged in as FW4, I went to my settings and then here's where I was earlier that I showed you where you can opt in to remove all opportunity recommendations and all invites. Here's the My Agencies button that I didn't access earlier. So in this case, I can see the two agencies that I have engaged with. So if I viewed bids, if I've been invited to bids from both these organizations, I can opt out and say I no longer wish to receive and deactivate the city of Fort Worth testing environment. This will no longer send emails from that agency. So there's no opt out and it doesn't allow you to pick and choose everyone. But if you receive an invitation from the city of Dallas and no longer wish to receive them, you can access the My Agencies button, select actions and remove them. What was the word? Deactivate them. So you would no longer receive from city of Dallas in that case. Great, and one thing I want to clarify for everyone is the city does have two portals right now. We have that you can see there on his screen. We have our testing only environment and then we have our actual public portal. The testing only environment is what we're using internally to get familiarized with the system. So please don't register on that environment. If you, because you will be able to see certain things there, but it's purely testing, everything will be on our public portal, which is you'll find that link on our website. It's also the one that's included on all of our emails. So please make sure to use that only. That's where January 1st will actually post all of our live bids. That's where all of our open projects will be. So nothing in our testing environment will ever actually be used for actual bids. So there's nothing there really that it's gonna be beneficial. So please ignore that site. Focus only on the public site and please don't register there. Thinking that it's the city's actual site. It has for testing purposes at the top. The website is also different instead of forwardtexas.bomfire.com. It is sandboxforwardtexas.bomfirehub.com. So please make sure that you're at the correct site. Okay, all right. And with that, we wanna thank you again for spending two hours with us. We appreciate it. Let us know if there's anything we can do to help. Thank y'all.