01732 759725 magazine 19 PROCUREMENT reduce administrative work and streamline purchasing processes. These smart capabilities strengthen Amazon Business’s ability to give customers visibility and control of procurement across multiple teams, further streamlining and automating buying processes, while continuing to provide an unmatched selection of products and attractive discounts. Tracking expenditure One organisation that has successfully streamlined procurement with Amazon Business is The King’s Trust, a UK charity helping disadvantaged young people to build confidence and skills for work. It came to Amazon Business with a requirement to improve visibility into its spending and to reduce spot buying by employees. The Trust now uses Guided Buying to centralise purchasing and track government grant expenditure, helping it move towards fully digital procurement. “As a charity we need to have excellent spend visibility and reporting capabilities,” said David Washbrook, Procurement Executive for The King’s Trust. “With Amazon Business, we are able to be more proactive and cohesive in our purchasing with a system that supports our insight-driven approach to spending. We can see exactly what we’re spending and where, enabling us to make smart decisions, improve accountability and ultimately direct more of our resources towards helping young people thrive.” As Amazon Business enters its next decade, it remains committed to developing customer-centric solutions that make business buying more strategic, efficient and transparent for organisations of all sizes. Find out more at: https://business.amazon.co.uk continued to develop its Socially Responsible Programme which, through features like Guided Buying Policies and enhanced seller visibility, aims to help businesses align their purchasing with social responsibility goals and supplier sustainability ratings. Having started with local seller purchasing, this initiative has expanded to include sustainability certifications for enhanced supplier transparency. Invoice by Amazon (IBA). Designed to simplify business procurement and eliminate the complexity of managing multiple vendors and invoices, IBA streamlines how organisations purchase and manage their business spending, consolidating millions of products under a single supplier framework. Features include monthly invoice consolidation, automated payment management and enhanced audit capabilities – all designed to reduce administrative overhead and improve efficiency. Spend Anomaly Monitoring. A Business Prime exclusive feature for Enterprise accounts worldwide, this intelligent system monitors business spend in realtime and alerts customers if it identifies any unusual purchasing activity. By proactively identifying anomalies, this tool reduces the need for manual audits, saving time, boosting efficiency and giving confidence to organisations looking to reduce rogue spend. Proactive Budgeting. Administrators can now use the Amazon Business Budget Management tool to create proactive allocations and automatically assign funds to new team members as soon as they join a group. By eliminating the need to assign budgets manually, employees can start purchasing right away and businesses can maintain consistent spending controls. It’s a simple way to Ten years on from its launch in the US in 2015, Amazon Business has reached the significant milestone of 8 million customers worldwide, including 96 of the Fortune 100, 66 of the FTSE 100 and hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized organisations, spanning sectors from education and public services to retail, technology and logistics. Together, customers in the 10 countries where Amazon Business operates (Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States) drive roughly $35B in annualised gross sales through the platform. “This milestone is a reflection of the trust our customers place in Amazon Business to help them navigate today’s complex procurement landscape,” said Shelley Salomon, VP of Amazon Business Worldwide. “Whether it’s a public sector team, a high-growth startup or a global enterprise, our goal is to make business buying work better for everyone. As customer needs evolve, we continue to invest in innovations that deliver the control, scale and intelligence they need to buy in a way that’s simpler, smarter and built for the future.” Recent enhancements In the last 18 months, Amazon Business has introduced a number of new features to help EU customers meet current procurement challenges such as a fragmented supplier landscape, more onerous compliance and socially responsible purchasing obligations and the ever-present requirement to do more with less. Developed in response to customer feedback, recent innovations include: An expanded Socially Responsible Programme. With socially responsible purchasing growing four times faster than its underlying business, Amazon Business has Amazon Business introduces new socially responsible procurement tools as it passes 8 million customer milestone Visibility and control
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