Amazon Business: Saving Time & Cutting Costs for Procurement
Amazon Business, the company’s online business-to-business procurement store, has announced a number of new technology features designed to help large business customers.
These include the Amazon Business App Centre and System for Cross-domain Identity Management.
Amazon Business is also making a number of iterations to its existing Budget Management and Guided Buying solutions. All of these technologies are designed to help large business customers, including multinational enterprises, universities, government agencies, education organisations and healthcare networks, simplify and modernise the way they shop for business supplies.
"Amazon Business wants to change how companies shop for supplies through our unmatched selection, deep discounts, and smart capabilities,” says Shelley Salomon, Worldwide Vice President of Amazon Business.
“We don't just react to the biggest challenges our customers have shared with us; we get ahead of them with new technologies so our customers can use their resources to navigate the unexpected and continue expanding their business.”
How UK procurement teams are faring
Amazon Business undertook research which revealed that UK procurement teams are struggling to drive efficiencies within their organisations. 49% of respondents reported complexity of system and multi-step processes as the main contributors to this problem.
Because of this, 70% of UK procurement leaders have acknowledged the need to optimise procurement functions. Respondents feel that business buying is cumbersome, convoluted, and time-consuming, rather than being a convenient, intuitive, and personalised experience.
Teams are spending too much time performing tasks related to processing orders, and leaders see improved procurement tools as the solution to this challenge.
How the tools will help buyers
To help address this challenge, Amazon Business has introduced and upgraded several tools available to business buyers in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Four stand-out tools are:
04: Amazon Business App Centre
Amazon Business App Centre is a new one-stop shop where business customers can discover, quickly set up, and connect their Amazon Business account with more than 25 third-party applications from around the world.
Solutions in the App Centre include integrated shopping, accounting management, expense management, inventory management, rewards and recognition, and business analytics.
The App Centre helps save leaders time and money through a single point of discovery, as well as eliminating or reducing the need to develop a custom solution for their organisation.
03: System for Cross-domain Identity Management
System for Cross-domain Identity Management is a new feature that automatically syncs users and group data from their organisation’s identity provider with their Amazon Business account.
This feature helps administrators spend less time maintaining and updating their Amazon Business account.
02: Budget Management
Budget Management streamlines the process of setting and reviewing time-bound budgets across an organisation.
Now, business customers can set spend thresholds and make budget amounts visible to buyers to get ahead of overspending.
Amazon Business also launched new ways for leaders to actively manage their budgets, including real-time tracking and usage reports, notifications when a budget is about to expire, pre-purchase approvals, and an option to create one purchase order (PO) instead of multiple, manual orders.
These updates empower procurement buyers to make informed purchasing decisions for their organisation while reducing the amount of time leaders spend auditing their purchases.
01: Guided Buying
Guided Buying makes it easier for leaders to manage employee spending by steering buyers to purchase decisions that align with their organisation’s preferences and goals.
Through a new toolbar, account administrators can now instantly prefer products with sustainability certifications in the Climate Pledge Friendly programme with a single click.
Leaders can also restrict, block, and require approval for certain product categories with an eligible Business Prime plan.
Through easy-to-follow visuals, Guided Buying helps procurement leaders save time educating their employees on what items they should or should not purchase.
How Amazon Business empowers all
Amazon Business makes business buying simpler by offering the same easy-to-use experience customers know and love from Amazon.
Since launching in the US in 2015, Amazon Business has empowered businesses of all sizes through unmatched selection, deep discounts, and smart capabilities.
Today, Amazon drives roughly US$35bn in annualised gross sales and has more than 6 million customers worldwide, including 66 out of the FTSE 100 companies in the UK.
Working closely with customers to understand their business buying challenges, Amazon Business continues to develop new technologies that make it easy for organisations and administrators to define, meet, and proactively measure progress toward their purchasing budgets and goals.
Amazon Business is now a strategic partner to businesses in 10 countries, including Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
"Being able to access affordable, fast, and adaptable suppliers through Amazon Business helps our staff to purchase the goods they need to deliver an excellent student experience in all departments,” adds Mark Illingworth, Procurement Category Manager at the University of Surrey.
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