Control Spend in Hybrid & Remote Workplaces
As most business have adapted to either a hybrid or fully remote business model, organizations seek scalable mechanisms to support their workforce and maintain spend. As procurement teams and employees continue to purchase items they need for work, organizations must ensure they are purchasing items within each team’s budget, even without direct oversight. If you’re a member of Business Prime or considering, you can access Guided Buying and use the preferred lists policy feature to maintain your teams spending goals and easily allow employees get the items they need.
Save time and improve spend management with Reorder Lists
One of the ways to keep track of your favorite items or the items you prefer your employees to purchase on your Amazon Business account is by creating a list and using the reorder list feature. Reorder Lists are an easy way to create and share the items that meet your organization’s purchasing goals. Items added to Reorder Lists stay on the list, which saves you time when you need to find and repurchase these common items. Plus, you can automatically prefer items on these lists and make it easy for your buyers to purchase items that meet your organization’s purchasing goals.
“What we like most about Amazon Business is the ability to find almost everything we need to run this company in one place. It’s difficult for businesses in Red River to get what they need efficiently, given we’re a few hours from the city. With features such as Business Prime and Reorder Lists, I just keep a list of my commonly purchased items, and in a push of a button anywhere on site, I’m restocked in 2 days without spending hours leafing through catalogs, or worse, driving to and from Albuquerque.”
— Michael Calhoun, Owner, Red River Brewing Company
Streamline buying for both employee’s and approvers with Guided Buying
Guided Buying, one of the many benefits of being a Business Prime member, enables you to customize the buyer experience to seamlessly steer employees towards approved products and away from things they should avoid. By configuring policies based on your purchasing preferences and overall procurement goals, you can achieve greater results through the collective action of your buyers, even in a fully decentralized environment. This leads to significant efficiency gains in the procurement process as your buyers are far more likely to choose approved items, and it reduces both the time it takes the buyer to find those items as well as the time needed for purchasing review, approvals, and returns processes.
For Five Star Senior Living, a senior living facility with over 280 locations and serving more than 27,000 residents, leveraged Guided Buying’s approval and blocking categories feature to streamline the buying process for both employee’s and their approvers. This helped employee’s easily find the items they needed that we’re compliant with Five Star Senior Living’s policies and filter out items that are not in compliance. With Guided Buying, Five Star Senior living now eliminates about 90 minutes each day spent on reviewing orders. Giving them more time to focus on their core business, improving facilities, and keeping residents happy and active.
Long term, Guided Buying enables organizations to achieve goals related to purchasing quality, purchasing compliance, supplier consolidation, and corporate policies, such as ensuring a portion of spend goes to local businesses or businesses with specific diversity credentials.
Combine a Preferred List policy with Guided Buying to improve employee buying
Combining Reorder Lists with Guided Buying is a great way to achieve the benefits of both with very little effort. The Preferred List policy in Guided Buying enables you to select a Reorder List and make it preferred for either a given group or groups in your organization. This means that all of the items on that list are automatically marked as preferred for all of the buyers in the chosen groups. This process makes it easier for your employees to discover items that are clearly marked as preferred by your organization, complete with a custom message. When your buyers search for items similar to those that are on your lists, your recommendations will get pushed to the top of the search results. Even more, the list and policy will remain in sync, so any changes you make to the list will be applied to the policy, and the list will automatically be shared with all of the employees in the groups the policy applies to.
We see customers benefit from preferred lists and create lists for items such as a, ‘Working from home’ equipment list, a ‘Supply room’ list, and an ‘IT equipment’ list to name a few. These lists and products will be prioritized on search without requiring any special behavior from your employees and you can create as many lists and policies as you need for your organization. Start empowering your employees to quickly discover and purchase the best items for their workday needs.
If you’re not a Business Prime member, you can explore the full list of benefits and start your membership today.
To get started, you’ll need to log in to your Amazon Business account to see your Amazon Business lists. Next, review or create Reorder Lists in the Lists section of Amazon Business. From here, Business Prime Admins can link these Lists by creating a new Preferred List policy under the Product Policies section in Buying Policies and Approvals.
Start linking Reorder Lists with Guided Buying in your Amazon Business Account or connect with a customer advisor today to create your free account.
