Greenville Public Schools

Amazon Business for Education is making a real difference in how districts across the State of Michigan – and across the nation – are working to streamline purchasing. Rather than focusing on the important work of teaching and supporting the school district, district staff were often forced to spend valuable time and energy on unnecessary paperwork, chasing down orders, trying to identify the purchasers, and ensuring the orders were appropriately approved. To solve the problem, Greenville Public Schools worked with Amazon Business to make their purchasing process more efficient, allowing district staff to direct their energy back to their students, where it belongs.

As the Director of Finance at Greenville Public Schools in Greenville, Michigan, Matt Andres has seen firsthand how an inefficient purchasing process can take time away from more important work. He pointed out that Greenville Public Schools is very proud of their mission, “Assuring all students the education necessary to participate as responsible citizens in an ever-changing world.” As their mission statement says, “We are committed to meeting the individual needs of each student and we have an incredible collaborative culture that encourages community involvement and partnerships.”

Improving the efficiency of their purchasing program is helping to facilitate this mission. Greenville has approximately 3,600 kids across a total of six schools. With just under 500 employees, they have an operating budget of just over $45 million. While they are a little smaller than some Michigan school districts, purchasing inefficiencies created headaches and inefficiencies disproportionate to their size.

What did procurement look like for you before Amazon Business?

“Our process here at Greenville was through the use of purchase cards (P-cards),” Matt said. “For the size of our district, we had around 78 P-cards. The building secretary and others would enter a purchasing requisition, which goes to a supervisor first, and then to me for approval. There was a lot of P-card activity through Amazon that would then have to be printed and reconciled with each monthly statement. Not having visibility into the purchasing made it hard.”

What does it look like now? What are some of the benefits that you are seeing to increasing that control now that you are using Amazon Business?

“We are pretty early in the process – only a month or so in. Already it has been welcomed with open arms.” The previous process of going through multiple P-cards, which required printing individual receipts and sending the paper formatted receipts for approvals, was cumbersome for their staff. Now, with Business Prime, they have 15 people set up on a single GPS account. They are still in the process of getting groups and approvers to streamline reporting and payment, but these 15 people are “really happy with the easier workflow,” Matt said. “We just set up a $500 approval limit. We can set that at any amount we want and that part is so nice. Anything over $500 will come to me, or however our board policy would want it set up. We have some control that way and it gave us some visibility without checking budgets for compliance every minute, which is important.”

How hard has the transition been in terms of the lift?

“It has been welcomed with open arms here in Greenville. It was a free-for-all, for lack of a better description, with the P-cards. We didn’t really have a lot of settings available from our P-card company. Business Prime has made that part nice. We can promote local vendors, or restrict non-prime items. That part has been nice to guide staff in making those kinds of purchases while still having some control.”

What has Amazon allowed your staff to do that they can’t do now with a lot of other vendors?

“For larger purchases on a P-card, we wouldn’t see that purchase in the business office for potentially 30 days or until the next cycle. Even for the administrator, they wouldn’t see that purchase until they received the employee statement to sign off on. With Amazon Business, it’s now real time.”

What would you say are the game changers since going to Amazon Business?

“For me, the big thing is the real-time approval and the other one would be the Amazon invoicing. With P-cards, our staff would have to print their packing slip, keep track of it, and turn it in with their P-card. Now we can get just one invoice from Amazon Business and split it up however we wanted by group. We can get invoiced every quarter or customize it to a different invoicing preference to match what we need it to be. That flexibility is really nice for us.”

Greenville Public Schools has seen a tremendous difference in its purchasing process in a short amount of time. They are no longer wasting energy with a multi-step procurement process. Instead, they are able to focus on the important work of teaching and supporting the school district. Amazon Business for Education is helping not only Greenville Public Schools, but districts all across Michigan, streamline their purchasing.