Sealed Requested Information

In Bonfire, a Sealed Requested Information Slot is an item of Requested Information that cannot be viewed by anyone until specific actions have been taken by the Project Owner to unseal it.

Sealed Requested Information can be used for bid openings, staged evaluations where the pricing 'envelope' must be sealed until a certain stage, or any other situation where certain items of Requested Information are to remain sealed until a certain point in time.

The process of creating Sealed Requested Information starts at the Create Project wizard. As you walk through the steps you will be able to select which items of Requested Information are to be sealed by simply checking the checkbox under the Sealed column.

In the above example, the Pricing document was selected as a Sealed document, and will not be viewable by ANYONE until the document has been unsealed. 

You may also mark a piece of Requested Information as Sealed after completing the wizard by clicking on Manage in the Requested Information section of the Project Details page.

So when is a document unsealed?

There are two methods to unseal a document or other piece of Requested Information:

1. By releasing any Evaluation Group which the sealed item of Requested Information is mapped to
2. by clicking the Unseal button for the given item of Requested Information in the Requested Information page of the project

Any Sealed items of Requested Information residing in an Evaluation Group are automatically unsealed when the Evaluation Group is released to reviewers. This is akin to starting the Pricing Evaluation in a 2-envelope project, where the pricing envelope is unsealed as the Pricing Evaluation stage begins.

If the Project Owner, for whatever reason, wishes to unseal a document WITHOUT releasing it for evaluation, they can do so by scrolling to the document under the Requested Information section and then clicking the Unseal button under the Seal status column:

Once a document is unsealed (regardless of whichever method is used), the time/date stamp, as well as the person who unsealed the document, are recorded and displayed under the Requested Information section as shown below.

NOTE:

• Unsealing a document or other piece of Requested Information CANNOT be reversed. You will not be able to re-seal a document that has been unsealed.
• Prior to releasing an Evaluation Group, please make sure to double-check that all documents residing under the group can be unsealed.
• Documents or other pieces of Requested Information cannot be bulk unsealed.