After years of consistent global disruption, CPOs are taking on a more strategic role, heading enterprise-wide initiatives such as sustainability and diversity and adopting a holistic mindset beyond the traditional cost-focused approach. Faced with dynamic industry conditions, ongoing supply chain disruption, and changing consumer expectations, companies worldwide have begun to realize procurement’s potential to tackle these challenges while promoting growth and innovation.

To achieve this new, wider agenda, procurement leaders are turning to digitalization to help relieve pain points and facilitate more efficient and effective processes. 

Amazon’s 2022 State of Business Procurement Report found the top two most significant day-to-day pain points of the past 12 months for B2B buyers were reliable delivery (43%) and maintaining compliance to spending policies to avoid rogue spending (40%).

Fortunately, the right procurement technology can not only help alleviate these pain points but can enable the transition from transactional procurement focused solely on cost and day-to-day tasks to more revenue-building activities that can safeguard you against reputation risks and bring value to your brand.

Just as it does for personal buys, Amazon Business empowers procurement teams to quickly and easily find what they need and have it delivered when they need it, effectively meeting the five Rights of Procurement and Delivering: 

• Right quality
• Right quantity
• Right place
• Right time
• Right price

The right price and quality; Making smart buying easy

Are your buys in line with your policies and guidelines? Are you on track to meet your savings goals? Will you be on budget?

With improved spend visibility and real-time data reports, procurement leaders are empowered to deliver and report on corporate aims, improve procurement efficiencies and drive more insightful buying decisions.

Visions In Education, a K-12 public charter school located in the Sacramento Valley region in California, was looking to optimize their purchasing process so they could spend more time helping students succeed. They also wanted to ensure they could offer parents the best deals while making sure the process for parents to purchase curriculum supplies and materials was not only efficient and user-friendly, but met all purchasing policies and budget guidelines.

Leveraging Amazon Business to deliver a centralized, scalable approach, Visions in Education was able to eliminate automatic invoicing. 

Tom Tafoya, Chief Operations Officer at Visions, said, “In the past, purchasing was a tedious task. Parents had to research materials from a vast number of vendors and then manually type orders into an ordering system. Once entered, parents then had to wait for the school to approve and process orders which often took a substantial amount of time, resulting in a delay that impacted the students’ learning.”

To optimize savings, the group leveraged the Guided Buying Feature available to Business Prime members and used Amazon’s Business Analytics to identify trends and improve the forecasting of needs, setting “preferred brands” so families and schools could ensure to receive the best value.

Help meet corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals

With the ease and speed of intelligent fulfillment, procurement organizations can ensure that buyers adhere to buying policies and regulatory compliance requirements. Amazon Business allows users to identify preferred, restricted, and blocked product categories or sellers and set spend limits. Additionally, organizations can identify appropriate approvers for buying policies, and assign multiple approvers if needed, ensuring compliance guidelines around budgets and approvals are always adhered to.

Amazon Business also makes it simpler to support ESG and diversity goals. Amazon’s seller certification program allows buyers to source suppliers that align with their diversity and sustainability targets quickly and easily, including supporting local and diverse sellers.

As your business grows, so do your needs. Business Prime can help you meet those needs, allowing you to expand your capabilities by aligning with the right partners and providing you access to offers and benefits from trusted brands.

When placed at the core of corporate aims and viewed as a growth engine rather than a cost center, procurement can drive revenue growth and innovation, control costs, mitigate risks and deliver performance.

By creating an efficient and reliable S2P process for both managed and tail spend, procurement can ensure employees receive competitive product pricing while easing transactional burdens and freeing employee time for more strategic value-adding tasks. It’s the first critical step in a mature, global, viable procurement process that mitigates risks, enables corporate social responsibility and delivers on the five critical Rs.

Originally published on Supply Chain Dive, click here to view.