Seattle Children's Hospital
Simplifying purchasing for a world-class children's hospital.
Overview
Ranked by U.S. News & World Report among the nation’s best children’s hospitals for 25 years in a row, Seattle Children’s Hospital turned to Amazon Business to streamline and simplify off-contract purchases. With thousands of smaller purchases made each year, Seattle Children’s saves time and money through an improved purchasing process that gives buyers access to Amazon’s marketplace, low prices, and familiar shopping experience.
Streamlining and tracking thousands of purchases
Maintaining superior standards of patient care is central to the mission of Seattle Children’s Hospital. It serves a large, cross-state area including Washington State, Alaska, Idaho, and Montana. To maintain this level of scale and service, efficiency is a must.
While most of the items Seattle Children’s purchases go through medical or surgical distribution channels, there are many smaller items that keep the hospital running on a daily basis. Procuring these took a tremendous amount of employee time to source, price check, and order. It was a labor-intensive, manual process requiring multiple approvals within departments before purchase requests even reached the procurement team, which then had to approve each one.“
"I have six requesters who order an absolute ton of low-dollar and low-risk items—many under $10,” says James LeRoy, Director of Strategic Sourcing & Value Analysis at Seattle Children’s. “It would have caused my team an incredible amount of extra work to circle back and approve each transaction, however Amazon Business offered a solution for Seattle Children’s.”
“I love that Amazon Business eases the purchasing process for our staff so they can focus on their value-add work.”
— James Leroy, Director of Strategic Sourcing & Value Analysis, Seattle Children’s Hospital
An improved process with a familiar experience
By using Amazon Business, Seattle Children’s has been able to streamline the process for purchasing hundreds of smaller items. “The main benefit of Amazon Business for us is the ability to shift costly, labor-intensive approval processes for these items, so users can order directly with a more simple review and approval process,” LeRoy says. “It’s saved us so much time, to the tune of 500 requests a year. Adding Amazon Business has had a significant positive impact for us.”
Amazon Business gives buyers at Seattle Children’s access to Amazon’s marketplace. “Whether it’s waiting-room toys, flashlights or another unique need that arises, Amazon makes the sourcing and purchasing of these items much more convenient for us,” LeRoy says.
The simplicity of Amazon Business saves resources with improved operational efficiency. “I love that Amazon Business eases the purchasing process for our staff so they can focus on their value-add work,” LeRoy says. “Our procurement team loves the reporting options, plus a tracking mechanism that helps our receiving team easily locate packages in transit.”
When buyers at Seattle Children’s need additional help, Amazon Business personalized customer service offers valuable expertise. “Amazon Business customer service has been awesome,” LeRoy says. “We have a great, solid working relationship with our Amazon Business rep. He was keenly aware of and in tune with our needs, and I really valued that.”
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