Sales automation solutions for procurement

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so today's session is on intelligent procurement using ai to drive savings and efficiency and we're really lucky enough to be joined um by amazon business for for this session and thank you for their continued support with six it's fabulous to have them here with us today and they brought along a case study as well so not only will we be cutting through some jargon and busting a few myths but we've got some real life application of of the um the technology to hopefully inspire you all to go away and look at where you can implement it in your organizations so without further ado i'm going to invite molly to join me molly dobson who's country manager at amazon business that uk and ireland hi molly hi emma hi everyone thank you for having me join you today yeah great to see you it's such an interesting topic i mean it's something that we lots of people are talking about it seems a bit of a buzz so we'll get to that in in a bit about kind of busting some of those myths and and cutting through the jargon but um tell me a little bit about about you and your role at amazon business sure um so my name is molly dobson i am the country manager for amazon business uk and ireland um i've been with amazon for just about seven years now and amazon business for the past three uh so i've worked on both the supply side and the demand side of amazon um so i spent a lot of time out in the field talking to customers vendors sellers and in my time with amazon and amazon business i've picked up on a lot of key themes that i hear from business leaders around the world and it typically comes down to the notion that business leaders are regularly asked to do more with the same or probably do more with less and i think the last year and a half has really brought that concept to the to the forefront even more where the demands on procurement leaders finance leaders buyers in general p l owners the demands are higher than ever and i i think if you need to be in an environment where you need to navigate coming out of the pandemic to find this new way of the future people really are starting to think differently about how they run their organizations the tools they use the resources they have things of that sort so what i want to do today um bringing it back to amazon business we we are a b2b marketplace and i'll spend a little bit time at the end talking about amazon business specifically um but i want to talk more broadly about finding efficiencies um driving intelligent procurement because there's a lot to learn i think from you all talking to each other and hopefully me bringing some of the the customer insights to the table and then keeley and harry of course um tell you their story in a bit so um again want to talk more broadly about intelligent procurements and tools and resources and things of that but then we'll bring it into a more practical space to talk about amazon business a little bit later excellent thanks for that and like i said ai has been a bit of a buzzword that's been around for some time now um and some of us are still grappling with with what it is and exactly how to um implement it in our business do you think we need to demystify exactly what it is and and how it can be used yeah definitely and i think um digital solutions in general or digital transformation initiatives it's been critical for helping everyone respond to the pandemic in the last year and there's a slide that we put together that i think kind of simplifies and distills the notion of ai ml buzzwords and bringing brings it into something that's a little more tangible so um the side that emma showed on the screen for you it's something that we use to talk to customers about ai and ml so think of it like these in embedded circles that you see and then the doing to thinking um band on the left hand side so automation is the overarching all-encompassing concept that we talk about that all of these other terms sit within so automation in this case we're really just talking about um the removal of human intervention reducing the need for humans to intervene in processes so this is just automation in general within automation you've got artificial intelligence so artificial intelligence really in its core is just the use of technology to simulate human behaviors and thought processes so digital technology it's everywhere it is absolute key to what we're talking about here with automation being the removal or reduction of human intervention and artificial intelligence using technology to simulate intelligence and thought processes so it's intelligence demonstrated by machines as opposed to the natural intelligence that is displayed in most humans let's say within artificial intelligence you've got the engine behind it so what powers artificial intelligence or ai it's machine learning so machine learning you can see sitting within artificial intelligence there machine learning a subset of artificial intelligence and that really is the use of systems here systems that are able to learn and adapt without requiring explicit instructions from a human or from inputs from a human and that can draw inferences from data so here we are we're talking about technology that stimulates human behavior and thought process with ai within that machine learning it's the power behind it it's the systems themselves that are the ones that are learning and adapting and learning how to draw inferences from data without you having to tell it what to do then at the core of that you've got you've got the brain this is where the real thinking happens and a term that we use for that or that is generally used for that deep thinking is deep learning here so deep learning at the core of this graphic it's a type of machine learning and it's based on this concept of artificial neural networks bear with me on this so these artificial yeah artificial neural networks they imitate the way that humans gain certain types of knowledge so this is where it gets really interesting because we we've created artificial intelligence the technology the machine learning systems to simulate that artificial intelligence but deep learning is when the systems and machines can really start doing some of that thinking without your intervention at all so think about things like uh computer vision or speech recognition now that's a fun one that we'll talk about later speech recognition technology and software and tools it learns from the inputs that it gets and it it creates its own knowledge and its own learning off the back of that so it's a really interesting um spectrum that you can see here starting with automation and seeing how all the different pieces fit together and it really follows along this line of thinking and doing so automation is the the doing it's the output of all of these um elements within it's when i can click a button and something happens and i don't have to do it that's the doing the thinking part is really what comes down to the core of deep learning and that's where the systems start being a little more intelligent than they were before and they learn from themselves so i i like this as a visual to kind of show how all the pieces fit together and how the words aren't exactly interchangeable even though some people use them that way but they are heavily related and i think in general procurement is a very data rich part of the organization often times though you can be data rich and insightful and the data within procurement can be very structured like the stuff that comes from tables and databases and things of that sort or could be completely unstructured so streams of real-time data on order information or customer feedback on a website so i think procurement is really an area that is ripe for use of artificial intelligence because it is so heavily reliant on that data but this is just kind of a visual that i think is helpful for me understanding how they all fit together and then i think is good for breaking down those buzz words a little bit absolutely that's made a lot clearer and um you're absolutely spot on with that data i mean loads of cpos that we've spoken to particularly over the last 12 to 18 months you know they've been called into more board meetings than ever asking for the the data the you know reporting etc so i can see where where this really fits in so what does that look like in reality though how do these tools really come to life there's a lot of different ways so there's another graphic that we like to share if you want to put it aside that we put together i like this graphic as well um so again it touches on all of these different elements in an organization and an organizational processes where ai and ml can really help and some of them you you know of without actually being aware of the the artificial intelligence behind it but picking off on a couple of these on the far left you've got merchandising for example intelligent merchandising this is where your your solution can identify based on how you've shopped in the past based on buttons you've clicked things you search for you can real time display content that is relevant to the the customer profile into what you think they'll buy and their circumstances so it could be seasonal related products or for example i got a puppy a few months ago locked down stereotype i will buy anything for my dog and i just happen to be shopping for little faux leather miniature sofas for a dog the other day don't judge yesterday i checked my email and i've got i've got a message from that provider that said um what do you know we've got 10 off pet accessories uh today and i click on the website and i see pet accessories everywhere so i know that i walked into that one but that's the kind of intelligent merchandising where you can display what is most relevant to your customer to get them to interact with it same thing with um circles up there you see like product recommendations because i've demonstrated certain behaviors the solution will tell me what it thinks i am most likely to want or what i am most likely to buy and give recommendations to me maybe even because other customers that have demonstrated similar behaviors then went on to buy a certain type of product so there's a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning power behind recommendations same thing that you'll see with customer service this is another big one um my energy provider spent a lot of time on their whatsapp customer service this week asking questions about my meter reading and it always starts with a chat bot that asks me basic questions tell me a b and c give me your account number okay great i found you tell me this and then it picks out the buzzwords and we'll say is this what you're looking for so that that kind of chatbot experience really is a demonstration of the deep learning the machine learning and the artificial intelligence but there are a lot of places that you look at these circles and you think yeah i can i can see it and some that you might not have thought of before that's really interesting and i guess you can you can see its application in in lots of our everyday lives we think with things like that you know you don't have to google something and then you know you either get adverts or emails like you say but why do you think adoption of this technology is still quite slow you know there's a lot of reasons that we hear and we we look at surveys we create our own surveys constantly trying to get feedback from businesses on why they aren't using more automated solutions and to be honest some of them are very practical i don't have the budget okay fair you might have to or might want to invest budget in a new solution uh but oftentimes it really comes down to a preference and a belief so you've got a big portion i want to say it's around 40 of respondents in one of the recent surveys that we did that cite cost issues artificial intelligence doesn't have to cost a lot there are ways for you to get the benefit of the solutions without having to put robots everywhere in your organization but the bigger contribution to reasons for not adopting it are based on not having business buy-in or uncertainty around the reliability of the solution and things of that sort so a lot of it is really around does your leadership buy into this concept do you buy into this concept and and going forward from there so you've got a couple of hard challenges around maybe cost maybe integration with legacy systems that takes a bit of effort but a big chunk of it is really just the lack of understanding or lack of belief in what it can do absolutely i'd completely agree with that and then taking it to um linking it to procurement specifically how are um ai and machine learning and procurement connected and and why are people adopting this technology where have you seen their um people specifically implementing it yeah so there's a couple um i put together two slides for for you all just to get a sense of how we think about this and there are a few different i think bigger picture reasons as to why organizations adopt um ai and ml because they're trying to unlock benefits and these are three that we regularly hear from our customers that we that we talk to them about automating the same save time and money that's really at the core of it when you look at that visual i had before on the doing to the thinking automation is that biggest circle around it all automation helps with the doing it's a way to save resource redirect resource towards more value adding projects and initiatives so you're saving their time and ideally you're saving money off the back of it as well so it's a really practical focus on resource management automate the non-value adding redirect that resource to do something else for your business so that's the first big one the second one is around just generally making more data-driven decisions so i said i think procurement is a very data-rich organization buying in general tends to be a very focused uh part of the business process making more data-driven decisions it's how to use data to to effectively analyze what to buy when from whom how to deliver it and then also ensure compliance against that as well so using data to drive decisions second biggest one in my mind and then the third is the one that um i think i i find the most interesting it's around visibility and then control visibility gives you control so a lot of times we we talk about tailspin and the problem with tail spend and why it's something that businesses need to face into a lot of folks will say i don't really care about tailspin i i'm focused on the the bigger chunks of my business i've got visibility what you think you do until you really start digging under the covers and understanding there's a lot of stuff happening in the business that you might not have visibility of it doesn't mean it's a bad thing because it assume good intent people are buying things they need to do their jobs well if you can harness all of that get visibility you can start identifying trends and maybe something that you thought was tail spend before actually is an opportunity to negotiate a contract and buy in bulk and save your business x percentage of pounds spend on that so i think getting visibility gives you control because you really start getting a grasp on what is happening in your organization so those are kind of the three overarching buckets that that i tend to think about in terms of why businesses use automation or uh ai and ml and then if i can click to the next one and then yeah i'll stop talking for a minute specifically about procurement these are really useful tools that procurement can use to help them improve the way they do their jobs and improve their output as well so thinking about using data machine learning artificial intelligence getting that real-time actionable insights this is super important for buying organizations or buying functions because you need to buy what your business needs you don't want to buy more than what you need and you certainly don't want to be short of what you need so having real-time information that can help you audit the state of your business and take very quick actions preempt problems before they occur it's really powerful and and this is where i think procurement again has a great opportunity to use data analytics artificial intelligence to get that real-time insight and take quick actions another part of that is operational efficiency this again is just helping you manage your resource better and ensure that your stay focused on the things that drive the greatest value for your business so operational efficiency save time save money that's what you want in procurement um and then the third piece really particular to this audience is probably around supplier risk management there is a great opportunity to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help drive your organization to buy from the suppliers that you want to and not buy from those that you don't and ensure that the suppliers you do buy from are giving you the best value so these are a few pieces that kind of tie back to that earlier diagram with all the different spokes on how it comes to life but a few focus areas that we tend to talk about a lot in relation to to procurement leaders absolutely and i think in the current environment especially i mean people are are looking to spread their risk much more moving away from sole sourcing so that's more suppliers to to manage so anything that can automate that and like say that tail end although that may not may end up being non-strategic stuff it's it's the area that causes quite a lot of noise uh for procurement teams and and a large amount of your time will be focused on on on that area with with you know um on you know low risk items so yeah and and particularly recently with shortages of items and commodity prices fluctuating like they do i think really getting some data and intelligence and that's one thing but then learning how to to analyze that and do something with it oh yeah i think it's really timely for procurement that was super interesting i i've learned a lot more actually from that so thanks molly um now you um this session is is going to be um case study led so i'm going to hand over to you molly to introduce your case study and then i'm going to come back and bring some questions for the audience so make sure that everybody um listening in um submit your questions into the q a box i'll be looking out from them and i will join you shortly so over to you thank you thank you emma um with that i would i am very pleased to welcome keeley and harry onto the screen so you can see them now um keeley is a procurement director at busy bees and harry a procurement manager um i've got the easy job here where i get to just sit on the side and talk about buzz words and technology it's a very different conversation to hear from the folks that are actually utilizing solutions that are data-driven artificial intelligence so that's why i'm really pleased to have both harry and keeley join us today to talk to you a little bit about um their experience so with that i will hand it over to keely and harry to talk to you about their case study thank you very much can we have the first live please so it seems it seems like yesterday but also um eons ago so in 2019 we began our journey to streamline our uk procurement function um previous to 2019 historically our heads of department and nursing managers had purchased locally and managed their own spend and some with credit cards and some with accounts which meant that for our nurseries alone we had 300 suppliers on our on our system which which was creating quite a lot of back office noise and so our journey began to streamline our uk procurement function because we wanted to deliver a purchasing experience to centers which was underpinned by a digital solution we knew that we needed to simplify rationalize and create compliance um but to deliver a prescriptive but not restrictive and procurement solution so we wanted to deliver in the here and now but also set ourselves up for the future um and leverage all the benefits which technology we know can drive for global procurement moving forward in the digital age so our journey began with the uk in mind firstly and but we we now know that the experience that we've created can be replicated globally as local temperature territory teams require next slide please so our mission was very clear and simple and as clearly said we had 300 product suppliers that centers nurseries purchased from we had very very little data we didn't know specific products that were being purchased etc so we had to standardize and streamline our procurement processes and also not just our central office working on processes but the processes that our centres and nurseries go through every day to ensure that they're fit for now but also our future growth and a big part of that was investing in a system that automates our back office invoicing processes and that took a lot of manual work away from our nursery managers and it created a much more efficient procurement offer for the business so we've rationalized our supply base we went from 300 product suppliers to about eight of our is that our improved supplier base size now um our centers have a digital experience with all of those it is self-serve for all of them it's very very simple we needed to make sure that the experience for them was future-proof so it had to be digital it had to have opportunities to improve in the future and we had to be able to prescribe where centers bought product categories from but we didn't want to restrict too heavily what they were buying because we wanted to make sure that we were guaranteeing compliance in our supply base and the centers were buying from where we had approved them to buy any products from and at the heart of all of that we've done for the past two years is delivering exceptional service value and quality both to us as a head office function the data that we receive the account management we receive but also to the centers as well so that they can see that you know this is this is the way forward for them next slide please so why amazon business um amazon business were never really part of the journey with the journey was set so that we would use um our traditional suppliers and amazon business contacted me on a number of occasions and i kept not answering the phone or not not answering those emails and then one day in may 2019 i decided to pick up the phone and jamie our account manager was on the other end of the line and actually he was a human being which i didn't think existed in amazon which was just amazing um i think with without the amazing account management we wouldn't be where we are today which i know harry's gonna talk to on the next next slide but amazon provides such a competitive marketplace but with that a number of controls that enable us to manage centrally what what our centers are purchasing and of course the speed and cost effectiveness of delivery um which is absolutely phenomenal our historic suppliers just just couldn't match so so of course we still have historic traditional um child care suppliers um but but particularly for our tail end spend and that is which again harry is gonna gonna pick up um the the amazon business solution for our centers and head office um teams is just phenomenal and i think you can you can see a quote there on the slide from from one of our regional maintenance technicians and who visit our centers on a on a periodic timetable um previous to having amazon business they would our technicians would nip off to local suppliers and and pick up supplies which would take chunks of time out of the day now they they place the order two or three days pre-visit the the equipment is waiting for the math center they can get on and complete their jobs and move on to the next job which which makes things much much more efficient for for the maintenance technicians but also the centers as well next slide please so there's three major wins and takeaways that we achieved with our rollout of amazon business in 2019 uh yeah for us as a business we gained 100 compliance and take-up and sign up of amazon business for our uk censors and we're about 360 sensors at the moment within six months of implementing amazon business and that meant that we could remove 80 individual amazon prime subscriptions that centers have signed up to on their credit cards which had to be manually coded and manually processed every month and consolidate that into one account that we pay for annually with an automated invoicing process in place as well and since then we've grown to implementing across our head office functions for our original maintenance technicians for example that's kelly set out but we're also now supporting our italian colleagues and they're working with amazon business in italy so that we now have 650 users across europe on amazon business we successfully transitioned 100 of our nappy spend and obviously talking about nappies is quite unique to child care but for us with 42 000 children in the uk we spend a lot of money on nappies and and we were able to consolidate from a brand leader to mama bear amazon brand nappies simply because largely because of the simplified ordering process you can see the quote from jess one of our central directors there how much easier it is the frequency of ordering that amazon allows the data that we can see when sensors are ordering what they're ordering et cetera is just brilliant for us and as kelly's already alluded to the account management that we receive from amazon business is brilliant we think big amazon business help us to make that happen and that can be from a dedicated ordering list for our maintenance technicians right the way through to a specific group to enable us from head office to reward our senses of excellence for the brilliant work that they do next time please so we we feel that we you know out of our 37 years of operating busy bees to two years with amazon is obviously our relationship is still in its infancy we've we've done so much and we've got so far but but we want to continue to to work with amazon um they're like-minded as harry said they they think big and they they listen to our ideas and press on with them so and we'd like to continue um engaging with amazon business to support our esg initiatives we we have we have a challenging plan which i'm sure that every every business has a challenging plan but we believe that amazon will support us to to make that happen there's no secret that our account management team know that that we really want to push forward and investigate opportunities for global expansion within the account so so to have one account for the business globally um which gives gives all of our colleagues across the globe the opportunities to purchase the same sort of um of items which which fit in with it with our global brand um and then also following the success of the mama bear nappy launch we we want to continue to expand categories with amazon brands and continue that partnership moving forward and and i think overarchingly amazon helps us to to support our centers to deliver the best starting life to our children and we've given our center directors back the gift of time so that they don't have to go out and look look for value and locally that that's us back to molly um i know i i spent a good amount of the time so far today talking about how automation removes human intervention so it's a little bit funny that is jamie's persistence and continuing to call keely that is the one that got them to to work with us in the end um but thank you to keeley and harry and i think it's it's a really good demonstration of how the busybees team had an idea of what they were trying to deliver and we became a part of that and now we're driving change together and and that's the exciting part around what we do and working with customers where it's not us pushing a solution on a customer we really thrive on helping individual organizations achieve their their own goals so i think harry and keeley are a really great demonstration of having that foresight having an idea of what they want to deliver and being committed to getting the adoption that they want with a solution that can last them for the long term so um please do ask any questions that you have for the busy bees team in the chat or we'll have a bit of q a time at the end um so i want to talk a little bit about the amazon business tools again so digital marketplace solutions such as amazon business that's what i'm highlighting today obviously uh we can help integrate ai and ml across the value train chain to translate data into insights and ideally find cost savings or help you achieve your other automation goals so this really this approach looking across the value chain is is how you can extend the procurement intelligence beyond just a procurement function to really elevate procurement up the strategic agenda of your company so one of the things that i i think i appreciate most about my time at amazon is that it is seeing how all the different pieces fit together um because when i talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning a lot of that power comes from amazon web services it's another part of amazon they create the the deep learning the machine learning the artificial intelligence and then you can feed that in to do other amazon solutions such as amazon business or incorporating alexa voice technology into your ordering so it's a really nice kind of cross amazon product offering so some of the things that i talk about today will tie together amazon web services amazon business and alexa but want to click through a couple of slides just introducing you to some of the features specifically that we have with an amazon business to help procurement finance and buying functions so looking at this uh first slide that i have here up on the screen um we're talking about automating or removing the human intervention automating your shopping ordering and delivery so these are just a few examples that i wanted to highlight um one around suggested products i mentioned that a little bit earlier with the broader picture with the spokes coming off of it suggested products this is where you can get recommendations of other products that you can find as substitutes as replacements as complementary products without having to go search for it and and this is just a way for you to save some time and think a little bit bigger about your purchases and how different pieces fit together and find things that are popular with other organizations that might be similar to yours the business lists i think are really helpful so creating a a shopping list of some kind or a preferred list that can be shared across the organization that makes it very clear what you think people should buy from certain product categories now this is a way to do a one-to-many exercise where you can curate the catalog into something very quickly that the you then distill out and individuals can buy directly from your shopping list without having to go go shop go think go do comparison shopping nothing it's a personalized list that you can create that can feed across your your business make for very easy reordering and then interestingly you can also assign budgets to different shopping lists if you say work from home something we've talked to a lot of organizations about in the last year still going to be relevant looking ahead as a lot of businesses have announced flexible working policies or even permanent remote working the ability to assign a maxim a maximum spend and direct people to what they need to buy and then audit it after it's really helpful for um automating that shopping and uh monitoring of ordering process deliveries also that's that's the most important part of the the chain that we talk about because you can order as many products as you want but if they don't come when you want them to or the way that you want them to it's not particularly helpful so using automation to set particular delivery windows you can set preferences to consolidate all of your deliveries if you want them delivered in a certain way you can use locker technology if you say that's great i love ordering things for our business we know we need to but my reception desk can't handle all of those parcels you can think about a locker solution where the individual buyers get a notification when their order has been delivered they go self-service to pick up no intervention needed from from another third party in there and then the mobile app this is something that um is increasing in importance in a business setting in a way that it really hasn't been before it's how people like to shop on their mobile and there used to be kind of this divide between i shop on my mobile for my personal life and i shop on my computer in my procurement solution for my business life no those all combined together now we we will be on the move again and people are moving more than more than ever in a normal state being able to get what you need when you need it with information at your fingertips it's super powerful for helping you automate that shopping order and delivery process so amazon business app great marketplace option for you having that mobile solution especially if your organization is one that has a big field force or folks that don't spend a lot of their time at their desks we're looking a little bit more about the intelligence piece of that um and the analytics so if you want to click to the next slide there there are a few features in particular that we developed for amazon business to do some of the things that keeley and harry were talking about before on streamlining processes finding those competitive offers and then ensuring compliance and control so the first piece around guided buying this is kind of a simulation uh or a replacement for an individual that needs to review and audit and approve every order before it goes through you can set up a system to help do that for you we call that guided buying with amazon business it's how you set up parameters on your account to determine how people can or should and cantor won't use your account so this is where again it doesn't have to be an individual making all of those decisions every single time you set up a solution to create a framework that does that for you and then your auditing is only needed when something falls outside of those bounds so it empowers your buyers to make the the decisions that they need as an individual but gives you as an organizational leader control on what happens now prior to my uh my role with amazon business actually at the beginning of my amazon days i i worked on what i called the nerdy side of fashion and i don't mean that in a bad way i really enjoy data and analytics and the power of data and analytics to help you make decisions now i'm not saying that you only rely on data and you never have to think again not at all the case but it really helps you save time and give you direction and help you verify um your beliefs and um i guess put weight behind your ideas so within the amazon business solution we have a a suite of analytics tools and this is where there's there's no need to copy paste drop whatever columns you want format in excel we're going to take all that work away and say every single order that comes to your amazon business account you have visibility to that in a real-time dynamic dashboard and you can look at all of the purchases happening within your organization you can look at it by group and say well i've seen business orders spike from this nursery or from this school or from this plant you can double click into that and see exactly what was purchased and by whom and when and know if you have questions that you need to ask so we don't want you to have to hunt for those insights what we want is for those insights to be presented to you and then your job is to take action on those insights so the analytics tool that we have in amazon business it's powered by amazon quicksite which comes from our aws team and it really helps you start analyzing those patterns and seeing those patterns in a way that you might not have been able to before and then the last piece i talked a little bit earlier around supplier compliance as emma said there's been a lot of supply chain disruption in the last year and a half and who knows if and when it'll happen again so having a dynamic approach for managing your supplier base and feeling confident with the suppliers that you buy from there are tools within amazon business that can help you do that shopping from hundreds and thousands of different suppliers and getting that competitive offer with a delivery promise you want without you having to go hunt for those orders do any of those comparisons vet those suppliers because we've done that for you so the intent of some of these tools is really to give you visibility compliance and control all in one place last piece then just kind of bringing that all together um yes i clearly i'm biased towards amazon business because it's the piece of the business that i work on but there's great power in digital transformation initiatives and b2b marketplaces such as msm business these are resources for you to bring ai and ml into your organization so if you click to the last slide this was just a little bit of a summary on some of the things we talked about today the the key focus oftentimes with automation or the removal of human intervention is really to save time and money it's to find you efficiencies so you can redirect that resource to do something else for your business the the brain power behind the ai and ml it really helps you define data driven strategies for how you make decisions on selecting suppliers deciding what to buy from those suppliers and ensure in compliance with the decisions that you make i get very excited like i said around the analytics because i think having true visibility into what is happening in your organization that is what unlocks your ability to get control over that spend and find opportunity and then the last piece is how you think a little bit bigger kiwi mentioned busy bees thinking big they have a business that they run today but it doesn't mean they always have to do things the same way they've done before we wanted we want to look ahead and think about how we can integrate intelligence across the value chain up and down and further bring buying up your strategic agenda and think a little bit differently about how buying fits within your organizational goals so that's kind of the overview that i wanted to share um on amazon business specifically and some of the tools that that we put in place to to help your organization great thanks molly that was really interesting and thanks harry and kaylee if they want to come back on screen as well we could take some questions we have had one question through um and i guess um we've been talking a lot here about buying products which i guess fits with with them the solution that we're talking about here but um what about non-standard requirements or services or non-repetitive um goods and where does the uh the ai and technology fit in there kelly and harry can probably comment from a busybee perspective for for my side we don't talk a lot about services within amazon business but never say never um so you will see in a lot of marketplace solutions amazon business included that there are product associated services which are things like installation or um basic maintenance and repair or you buy a camera and you get uh photography lessons with it so that sort of marketplace model still works the same for services as it does for products and being able to quickly make those comparisons set parameters for what you want and don't want and be able to make a selection that way so it's not something that we spend a lot of time on today simply because we still have a heck of a lot of work to do on the product side of it but the logic is still the same in terms of how you can find efficiencies i think in my mind at least okay what about what about you have busy bees in terms of non-products yeah i think we're probably in a similar place molly with where we are having spent a lot of time focusing on our product procurement that was in such a disparate place and no data no visibility behind it to have got that to the position that we're in now is brilliant but yeah we are very much on the journey of putting in the similar logic the similar processes for our services but i would agree that that you know there is the potential there there's no reason why it also wouldn't work for the same for the different areas excellent and and busy bees one through for you um from the audience as well about um you know you're obviously got a global operation and you're rolling this out globally um have you had any um have you had any problems with um countries where amazon business is not yet available is it has that been an issue um it hasn't been a massive issue right now because because our journey began with um the uk and then and then europe so that's where we're focused but moving forward and we're expecting that amazon will move in at the same pace as as we will yeah so for example the our biggest overseas territories are singapore and australia the us and canada obviously it's going to be fairly you know it's a fairly reasonable expectation that amazon business will be operating there but we're also in vietnam so you know that may have to come at a later date yeah so kind of a phased roll out there as things come on board and um i guess a couple of questions from me really um for harry and keely uh what was um how did you pull your business case together to get buy-in for this really was it quite an easy sell or did you have to do some convincing i think i think it was it was quite the easy sell i think you know when you look at the data having mentioned that we had 80 80 amazon accounts 80 or 90 amazon accounts and within those accounts within the centers we'd spent around 90 000 pounds in in 2018. so there was an argument there that actually even though we were telling our centers they shouldn't be using amazon they were using amazon and because we wanted compliance from our centers with with a whole lot of new policies that we're putting in to create compliance we knew that actually if if we gave them amazon for their tail spend then then we were very much hoping that they would they will comply so literally it was it was a conversation and a pitch to our ceo who actually said can't we buy everything off amazon and we said well no not today the expectation is that that one day our our centers will have that amazon styling you know experience for all of their shopping and what other areas are you looking to expand this are you looking to increase other category areas as part of this yeah i think we mentioned on on the slides about about the brands amazon nappies have have really been a massive success for us because they're consumable because that because we order them on a very very regular basis the the delivery function fits very well for us so you know we we always speak to amazon about all of the different things that they couldn't they could deliver for us and every tender we we complete amazon are always invited so we we have some products in mind um but but in terms of the the big development we we believe that they'll definitely be with with amazon brand great and um molly can you give us a feel for the types of category spends that are currently available in amazon business and and um where you're looking to expand these yeah i think the i would say the most common product categories that we talk about with customers are office supplies and i.t peripherals and especially in the last year and a half again with that remote working for a lot of folks um that's just the products that they need but that's sort of just scratching the surface because i don't think we talked as much about nappies as we have in the last year and a half with busy bees and the discussions there and you think about some of the other customers we work with we a lot of people don't know that we launch categories such as business industrial and scientific supplies so laboratory equipment and supplies professional medical dental uh janitorial and sanitation these are things that people don't typically associate with amazon but these are products that we sell and i would say one one important thing to think about is a lot of folks look at amazon as we're one one giant entity we're really not amazon business is a conduit for hundreds and thousands of different suppliers across the country to reach customers and we talk a lot about supporting local businesses because again people look at amazon and say but you're this huge beast i want to shop local you couldn't do that a lot during the pandemic because we were physically restricted in terms of where we could move so amazon business it's a marketplace solution because you have different sellers that specialize in different products that can reach a customer base that they wouldn't be able to otherwise so we've got a lot of our small sellers that specialize in certain product categories and product types um but i would say more broadly office supplies and it are the most common and then you get into typically maintenance repair type type products as well but yeah big orders for nappies and then dog poop bags actually that's been a big one in the last year who knew is it just because you've brought your dog you see you're more aware of it that's what it is interesting it has a couple of our customers that we work with that have um security dog uh dogs on site that they need to buy that for their business and once you noticed it we noticed it everywhere so that was a really interesting one for us this year excellent we've had a question for you from a niche it's probably for you molly about um any prerequisites um for incorporating ai into procurement other than the availability of clean data does amazon require a business process to be in a certain format or everything to to link in with your with your services no so there's a couple of different pieces to that so within the ai and the ml that we have within amazon business there's no requirements on on the business side in order for someone to be able to utilize those solutions if you go into a bit of a deeper space on wanting to integrate with a single sign-on provider or want to integrate with existing solutions you already have then there needs to be more of a tech discussion on on managing that but the the analytics tools how you use the automation the referred products things of that sort nothing that you need to do to be able to adopt those solutions right away excellent um for another question through um does artificial intelligence help in calculating real-time shipments so i guess you're you're not only getting that visibility on spend but when you can expect to receive your goods too yeah and i think that that we probably know from our consumer lives as well especially if you're a prime customer when you log on and you look at an item that says if you order it within the next one hour and 27 minutes you'll have it by this time tomorrow and all of that really is just how we're tracking the movements of products and that's not an individual doing it it's the it's the machines tracking it excellent and the suppliers that come on board for your marketplace how receptive have they been to adopting this technology and providing the services yeah i think a lot of the suppliers we work with and the customers like what keeley said is that they have they have an idea of what they want to accomplish as a business and if we can work with them on developing our existing or finding new solutions to do it that's where that's where the fun really is but i will say it very much depends on the organization how open they are to adopting artificial intelligence or automated solutions it it's not specific to certain industries or geographies it really depends on the organization what sort of buy-in they have for it excellent uh well that was brilliant thank you so much thank you harry and keeley for joining us that's really insightful and best of luck with your continued success on using amazon business and molly thank you for cutting through some of that jargon and helping us to understand it that was really great thank you both for joining us so um um i hope you enjoyed that session uh we recorded today's session so if you wanted to share that within your own organization i will be sending you the link to the to the recording uh later this week or next week um and also amazon have a second seminar with us which is on we'll find the date here the 8th september so make sure you sign up for that one too and that one will also be recorded as well so if you if you don't manage to catch it real time then you can watch back on demand so thank you very much indeed i can just say details have gone into the chat on that one how to register for the for the next one so thank you very much indeed thanks for all the questions coming through really great session there really insightful hopefully cutting through some some jargon and understanding that technology a bit more and how you can apply it in your own organization so thank you and enjoy the rest of your day