“If you're not caring for a senior, care for someone who does.” is the heart-felt sentiment of Jack McCarty, Senior VP of Sales and Marketing for Pacifica Senior Living. A message that gives insight into the driving force behind the company’s mission to provide the highest quality care to their residents at 96 communities across 13 states. With the help of Amazon Business, the company has been able to realize procurement cost efficiencies through supplier consolidation, improved workflow approvals and spend controls. These solutions have enabled Pacifica to focus on what matters most - Providing a higher standard of care to the residents they’re honored to serve.

Founded in 2006, Pacifica Senior Living is the largest division of Pacifica Companies which was founded in 1978. The leadership at Pacifica are proud to serve the over 10K residents and their families, but at the end of the day an organization of this size still requires controls. Amazon Business as Pacifica’s strategic buying partner has helped with those controls which dovetailed nicely into Pacifica's overall mission. “We strive to provide and create lifestyles of independence and peace of mind that are focused on each individual resident and their families. Allowing our teams and our communities to have a plethora of different purchasing choices allows for that independence,” Jack said.

Supplier Consolidation

In order to drive purchasing costs down in such a large organization, it was imperative to understand and resolve the various procurement inefficiencies. This started with standardizing on the number of suppliers across the communities and gaining much-needed visibility into what users were purchasing and how they were spending.

Through Amazon Business supplier analysis, it was found that each Pacifica community had a cumbersome number of different suppliers they were utilizing. Further analysis revealed that Pacifica was not leveraging its buying power, particularly for routine purchasing. Pacifica communities routinely bulk purchase in a given month specific products such as maintenance and janitorial supplies, nursing and other care items. For example, the ordering of 50K surgical gloves per month should be seen as a cost saving opportunity using negotiated pricing. This wasn’t happening until Amazon Business stepped in. Reducing the number of suppliers and negotiating prices based on spend. “Amazon Business helped us replace about 95% of our vendors across the organization by centralizing them. This has also allowed us the ability to scale when we acquire new properties and has brought a significant efficiency to our purchasing program,” Jack said.

Consolidating and streamlining suppliers has also made the accounting side of things much easier through the processing of invoices. Pacifica’s accounting team is now only processing invoices from a handful of vendors which has eliminated some of the wasteful time spent on tracking down documents for the thousands of other vendors previously suppling Pacifica’s communities. Processing some 30 thousand invoices in 2022 was accomplished in far less time.

Streamlining the process and reducing the number of suppliers has also allowed Pacifica to ensure their communities are purchasing products that meet internal guidelines for healthcare and safety, and that the properties are both purchasing items in compliance with those guidelines and are within budget. Using the Business Prime feature of Guided Buying policies has helped tremendously in being able to identify preferred products and suppliers. “We’ve increased our diversity spend approximately 25%. We also love that we have the ability to support our local vendors or other small businesses. I don’t have to go out and do the research myself. It’s all right there provided by Amazon Business. If I find a vendor that is the same price as a big conglomerate company, we will make the choice to buy from the smaller vendor. That’s definitely important to our organization and we fully embrace that ability to support small and diverse suppliers.” Jack added.

Expense Controls and Insights

Amazon Business has also allowed Pacifica to get a better handle on optimizing how their community’s users are spending through analytics insights with Amazon Business Analytics. At Pacifica, employees in each division are empowered to be users at each property. Subsequently, tail spend (rogue spending) became a significant challenge across the communities. Items were being purchased and delivered before compliance checks and approvals could be done. If a certain type of refrigerator in the kitchens was required for budget and compliance, the purchase of an out-of-compliance and budget refrigerator was made before the approval process could catch it. That's why the approval workflows, spend analysis and budget component are so important. “Amazon Business has been a great partner for us,” said Lindsay Watson, Purchasing Manager at Pacifica Senior Living. The spend intelligence analytic tools have allowed Pacifica to save time and money through faster and more accurate decision making, and to shape and influence smarter spending habits across the organization. Through Buying Policies and Approvals, Pacifica has been able to reduce tail spend and foster greater spend transparency in their organization. In the near future, Pacifica plans to fully utilize the Budget Management tool to set spend limits on orders and steer their community’s users to stay within identified limits or seek approval for orders exceeding those limits. This will further keep tail spend at bay.

“The analytics and insights technology have been a great tool. Amazon Business has given the ability to actually track our spending and we are eager to see the cost savings. We have some sharpening the pencil to do on our end to track previous spending, but since implementing Amazon Business we now have a platform to be able to track that company-wide” Jack said.

Business Prime has been a big help in that area. Business Prime has allowed Pacifica to take advantage of Spend Visibility to improve transparency into the organization’s purchasing and spending trends by individuals and by groups. With Spend Visibility, Pacifica can leverage pre-built reports and dashboards to make smart budgeting decisions, identify areas to improve compliance with purchasing policies, and find opportunities to save in the future. “Just being able to examine the data of what our communities are utilizing on an ongoing basis (such as the housekeeping supplies, the gloves, the different care needs) has been a big help,” said Lindsay.

Jack and Lindsay both agree that one of the great things about Amazon Business is that no order is too large or too small. “Our communities can find what they need and have it delivered practically anywhere. We have some very remote properties. Some are out in the desert and not close to one of the other leading freight companies. We were incurring high delivery charges for deliveries to those properties. With Amazon Business, we have greatly reduced our freight costs.” Lindsay said, “Our ordering can be quite diverse between communities. One month a community has an office supply order and the next month a property needs two washing machines. It's really nice to not have to go back and forth finding the appropriate vendor, price, delivery etc. and you know the item is going to arrive as promised,” Lindsay added.

In conclusion, Jack said “We're excited to see what the future holds in our relationship with Amazon Business. We are doing everything from a procurement efficiency perspective that our organization wanted to do and we are looking forward to expanding on that. The convenience of knowing that Amazon Business will be there, having that central hub where our communities can find what they need, and giving us at the corporate office the visibility to see and control what our communities are purchasing has been extremely beneficial. It has really streamlined things for our organization and we are really excited to see what the future holds.”

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