How teams can thrive in a decentralized environment
Centralizing the Process
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Maintaining effective procurement processes can be a major challenge when your business is growing. As the volume and complexity of purchases increase across your organization, processes can become inconsistent. Staff turnover and labor shortages compound the issue. The downstream results can include increased rogue spend and decreased visibility. Procurement teams end up spending more time navigating procedural complexity, making them less efficient and taking time away from value-adding tasks.
Systems that centralize procurement processes and easily onboard new users are critical in such an environment. An effective procurement solution streamlines purchasing across decentralized functions and geographies, while maintaining compliance and reducing costs.
Assessing spend visibility
Beyond direct impact, such as more efficient purchasing processes and cost reduction, spend visibility helps procurement teams align with broader organizational goals of expansion, sustainability, and innovation. Real-time spend visibility can also provide early warnings related to supply chain risk.
In a nutshell, spend visibility means understanding who buys what, how, and how often. Comprehensive visibility into organizational spend enables procurement teams to make better budgeting decisions, identify compliance issues, and reduce expenditures.
Consider where your organization stands on these key elements of spend visibility
Spend reporting:
How easily can stakeholders see reports?
Real-time insights and customizable dashboards
Real-time insights
Upon request
Whether formally defined or not, all organizations follow a procurement lifecycle through five key stages:
Preparing for smarter procurement
1. Defining business needs 2. Evaluating suppliers and selection 3. Managing supplier relationships 4. Delivery of goods and services 5. Analysis and refinement of processes
As the volume and complexity of procurement in your business increases due to growth or decentralization, it’s worthwhile to examine each step through the lens of best practices and new technologies.
In the section below, we’ll look at ways organizations can more intelligently and proactively define their process.
Create a formal purchasing policy
Leveraging your centralized system to meet responsible purchasing goals
Balancing stringent business requirements with responsible purchasing can be challenging, especially across a decentralized workforce. But many organizations have discovered that it can also result in good business by strengthening supplier relationships as partners align around sustainability goals, for instance.
Centralized e-procurement tools can help companies track key metrics (such as energy usage and waste reduction), create detailed reports, and evaluate the effectiveness of these initiatives. Hover below to see how they work.
A strong policy defines:
• Who can make a purchase
• Approvals required based on spending thresholds and expense categories
• Documentation required, such as
quotes, contracts, and receipts
• Processes for submitting and reconciling purchases
Standardize supplier selection based on business needs
Though established, long-term relationships with reputable suppliers can be invaluable, e-procurement systems help automate the evaluation of vendors based on ratings across a variety of criteria. Such systems can even incorporate RFPs and auctions.
Reduce friction for onboarding and purchasing
To ensure employees follow the process (and reduce rogue spend), focus on simplicity and clarity. Rather than asking users to enter department information, project codes, and cost center numbers, modern systems can often capture this information from user profiles. They can automatically route sign-off approvals.
Use technology to audit supplier compliance
Organizations should monitor their suppliers for contract compliance and risk. Manual vendor audits can be time-consuming and prone to error, especially across multiple suppliers and geographies. Modern e-procurement systems allow organizations to automate supplier compliance check-ins.
Environmental considerations
Social responsibility
Economic viability
Amazon Business combines product selection and convenience with powerful tools for improving your purchasing operations. In addition to benefiting from quantity discounts and wholesale prices, buyers can easily request custom quotes
from suppliers.
Procurement leads can easily add buyers, manage permissions, and ensure security with single sign-on. They can also set budgets, create buying policies, and
approve workflows.
A powerful toolset to help centralize purchasing
What’s your procurement priority?
Optimizing purchasing
Simplifying buying, onboarding, and access. Customizing and automating budgets, ordering, delivery, and invoicing.
Driving purchasing efficiency
Discovering analytical insights, scaling buying, and managing cash flow.
Filling operational gaps by integrating your existing procurement tools.
Expanding operational capabilities
Find out more about how Amazon Business can help centralize your procurement function.
Learn more
Smart purchasing tools can help buyers find climate-friendly products with a variety of sustainability certifications.
Smart purchasing tools might allow buyers to find suppliers that uphold fair labor practices and support diversity or find local businesses that boost regional economies.
Smart purchasing tools can help buyers balance sustainability and profitability by ensuring that upfront costs lead to long-term savings.
AI-driven predictive analytics
Analytics by vendor and/or source
Annual contract analysis
Spend analysis:
Organizing, analyzing, and reporting to improve decision-making
Cross-department real-time tracking
Full
Limited real-time tracking
Partial
No real-time tracking
Limited
Data capture:
The ability to track spending, ideally in real time
Full
Partial
Limited
Full
Partial
Limited
Sponsor content is produced in collaboration with advertisers by Insider Studios, the branded content team at Insider Inc. Insider's editorial staff is not involed in the creation of this content.
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Smart purchasing tools can help buyers find climate-friendly products with a variety of sustainability certifications.
No real-time tracking
Limited real-time tracking
Cross-department real-time tracking
Annual contract analysis
Analytics by vendor and/or source
AI-driven predictive analytics
Upon request
Real-time insights
Real-time insights and
customizable dashboards