Amazon Business launches solutions to digitally transform procurement

Amazon Business enterprise, small business, nonprofit, and education Customers can take advantage of these suites of software solutions designed to enable organizations to purchase products from the Amazon Business store and efficiently report and reconcile those purchases. The solutions provide customized capabilities in six main areas of procurement including:

1. Business-only Selection: Access millions of products in bulk packaging with quantities and sizes businesses need with Bulk Buying and Quantity Discounts.

2. Operations: Simplify procurement with customized workflows and fulfillment preferences, while improving efficiency of ordering, delivery, and invoicing through Manage Your Delivery, Approvals, and Budget Management.

3. Analytics: Automate reconciliation, track spend, and discover purchasing patterns using Amazon Business Analytics, and Spend Visibility.

4. Compliance: Define guardrails and create scalable processes to manage and guide purchasing with features such as Approvals Workflow, Budget Management, and Guided Buying, available with Business Prime.

5. Payments: Free up cash flow using flexible payment solutions for eligible customers such as Pay by Invoice or the Amazon Business Prime American Express Card, subject to approval.

6. Value-added Services: Improve company operations through integrations with a broad set of eProcurement systems and Amazon Business Professional Services capabilities.
 

Purchasing teams at enterprises, small businesses, nonprofits, and education institutions face challenges meeting their organizations’ goals to improve efficiency and reduce costs, while dealing with unprecedented changes in the purchasing environment. For enterprises, accelerating digital transformation reinforces the need to lower the total cost of purchasing and improve buying efficiency. Small Businesses need tools to improve cash flow, onboard new users, and simplify buying. Education institutions must quickly onboard new suppliers while working within established cooperatives, such as OMNIA, and meet the demands of educators to control and efficiently manage budgets. Nonprofits need to find ways to reach new donors and increase their spending efficiency. These goals are further complicated through a desire to move socially responsible purchasing forward, including purchasing from diverse, local, and sustainable sellers. Finding, on-boarding and recruiting sellers is time consuming, and maintaining and continually validating the set of sellers is challenging. In addition, all procurement leaders must find new ways to efficiently set, manage, and create budgets for their buyers.
 

Amazon Business has created a suite of software tools that enables Customers to save time and money, giving them an opportunity to do more for their organizations. Enterprise, education, and nonprofit purchasing leaders can find efficiencies by improving visibility into spend, managing purchasing both by category and supplier, and simplifying reconciliation. Small Businesses can benefit from tools that allow them to manage their users' purchasing through a shared business account rather than individual consumer Amazon.com accounts. Each of the software solutions have been developed with customer needs in mind and have been created to provide customers a comprehensive set of capabilities needed to optimize purchasing, improve spend intelligence, and accelerate growth.
 

The small business solution is designed to enable business buyers to save time and money. The solution provides time-saving capabilities, including access to hundreds of thousands of suppliers within a single store, utilizing a shopping experience that is familiar to part-time business buyers, and building and sharing reorder lists. Business-only pricing, multiple options for optimizing cash flow, including the Amazon Business Prime American Express card (subject to approval), and the ability for eligible customers to Pay by Invoice, plus a host of partner benefits including security, webhosting, and survey and analytics tools, provide multiple options for savings.  Small business Customers can learn more about these solutions here. 
 

The enterprise solution improves spend intelligence, integrates with existing procurement systems, and improves delivery capabilities to meet the needs of a shifting workforce. The solution uses buying policies to meet corporate goals for diverse, local, and sustainable procurement from certified sellers. Amazon Business offers integrations with existing eProcurement systems through a Punchout feature, along with secure access through Single Sign On. With Business Prime, Enterprise customers can use Spend Visibility, an analytics and data visualization tool to identify purchasing trends, enabling businesses to optimize spend and make data-driven decisions. Enterprise Customers can learn more about these solutions here.

The education solution anchors on cost savings and compliance features. This solution provides the tools to manage educators’ purchasing needs as well as software to reshape buying within educational institutions. Guided Buying, available with Business Prime, helps administrators create policy rules that guide employees to approved products and help prevent procurement violations. You can also integrate with other eProcurement systems with Punchout access, purchase through existing cooperatives, and make tax-exempt purchases at the point of sale through Amazon’s Tax Exemption Program.  The solution not only helps teachers and staff purchase the items they need, but also supports administrators and superintendents by providing centralized access to spend data and control of what products are allowed for purchase and which are restricted. Education Customers can learn more about these solutions here.   
 

The nonprofit solution focuses on saving time, optimizing spend, driving compliance with internal purchasing policies, and creating purchasing transparency. Managing compliance against unchecked spend means decentralizing purchasing while maintaining control in an environment where every dollar spent represents a choice between funding critical staff, operations, and programs or administrative overhead. The combination of cost-saving tools—including business-only pricing and applying purchases made by the nonprofit to the organization itself through the AmazonSmile donation program— lets nonprofit organizations increase the efficiency of their financial resources. The Donation Driver capability allows nonprofits to reach the long tail of donations by having donors directly purchase items the organization needs and having them delivered directly to where they are needed.  Nonprofit organizations can learn more about these solutions here.   
 

For more information about how Amazon Business can help organizations optimize purchasing, enhance spend intelligence, and accelerate growth, visit our Find Solutions page.  https://business.amazon.com/en/find-solutions/.