Experience the best of Amazon Business as a Business Prime member and get exclusive access to Spend Visibility and Guided Buying to improve your procurement process. Spend Visibility makes it easy for organisations get a complete picture of spend and employees’ orders over time. By having visibility into organisational spend at any moment, you can make better budgeting decisions, locate compliance issues, and find opportunities to save in the future. Paired with Guided Buying, you can leverage your spend insights to define and create policy rules that guide employees to approved purchases and steer them away from products or categories that you’ve identified as restricted. Plus, when you set up a new Guided Buying policy, you can use the Spend Visibility Policy Adherence dashboard to track compliance with purchasing policies across your organisation.

Remove barriers and gain insight into organisational purchases with Spend Visibility

As a Business Prime member, you can access pre-built and custom dashboards to view spend across your organisation and analyse purchasing trends. Spend Visibility’s dashboards allow you to quickly identify opportunities for your organisation to create new purchasing policies or ways to save. Even more, you can to drill down to the details you need with filters for PO number, invoice, suppliers, account groups, spend categories and more. Another reason customers love our Spend Visibility feature is the ability to monitor performance goals in real time with customisable spending and savings trackers. Since Spend Visibility is cloud-based, you won't need to be at your desk to stay on top of where money is being spent; you can access insights from any device. Once you’ve identified the need for a new purchasing policy, Guided Buying makes it easy to set policies that help your employees get what they need while delivering organisation-wide compliance.

Five Star Senior Living, a senior living facility with over 280 locations in the United States and serving nearly 27,000 residents, provides seniors an enriched experience with the warmth and hospitality of home. But maintaining that level of service consistently and efficiently is no small feat. Before turning to Amazon Business to streamline the buying process across all locations, they received nearly 60 new vendor requests a day from staff members in their communities for any number of new items they needed.

By integrating Spend Visibility and Guided Buying into their daily operations, Five Star Senior Living gives their team the fiscal benefits of real time spend insights, offering better budget control and helping them manage their business more effectively. With the category level detail provided by Spend Visibility, Five Star Senior Living understands what product gaps exist from their suppliers. For example, if staff are buying 300 count sheets on Amazon instead of their existing suppliers, this indicates a gap in their supply chain. “We’ve always been able to fill these gaps with Amazon. Now, with the analytics from Spend Visibility, I can identify these gaps and plan better for the upcoming year,” says Kevin Turner, Five Star’s Vice President of Supply Chain.

Pairing Business Prime’s Spend Visibility and Guided Buying, Five Star Senior Living powers a centralized purchasing process. Using Guided Buying’s approved and restricted categories feature, Five Star Senior Living 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.

Increase savings and track compliance in your organisation with Guided Buying

Guided Buying helps track your organisation’s purchasing goals by automatically steering employees to the right products or suppliers defined by y­­our organisation. Identify preferred products or suppliers, restrict categories, and save time for everyone by removing the mystery out of shopping for work by providing clear answers to the question: What am I allowed to buy? Guided Buying helps buyers find what they are approved to buy and allows them to submit requests to purchase items from restricted categories. Requests will get routed to your identified approver when necessary where you can either provide an exemption or decline.

Once you’ve defined Guided Buying policies, you can track whether employees are adhering to your organisation’s policies and compare restricted and non-restricted spend based with Spend Visibility’s Policy Adherence Dashboard. To further help employees avoid products that violate your organization’s policies, such as alcohol or personal items, Business Prime Enterprise customers can enable Blocking policies. When you block unapproved items, this disables the Add to Cart button for employees. The benefit of blocking unapproved items increases buyer efficiency and decreases the burden on approvers.

“Spend Visibility and Guided Buying from Business Prime have been tremendous assets in giving us insight and oversight of our spend."

—Kevin Turner, Vice President of Supply Chain, Five Star Senior Living

Pairing Spend Visibility and Guided Buying makes it even easier for your to manage activities across your organization and stay on track with purchasing goals. An elevated procurement process is closer than you think with Amazon Business.