Name: Wb Amazon Spend (1080p)
Uploaded: 2025-11-18T08:40:47.753Z
Duration: 26 min 40 s
Description: Wb Amazon Spend (1080p)

Transcript for "Wb Amazon Spend (1080p)": Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar today in partnership with Amazon Business. My name is Tom Chapman, and I'm the editor in chief of Procurement Magazine, Supply Chain Digital, and Manufacturing Digital. Today's webinar is part of an ongoing series with Amazon Business, where we explore the big issues keeping procurement practitioners and supply managers up at night. Make sure you visit the webinar section on the procurement magazine website for more insight, expertise, and success stories. I'd also just like to mention our procurement and supply chain live event series, which promises to be bigger and better than ever in 2026. We'll be having plenty more discussions similar to this at events in Chicago, London, and beyond. Now today's session is called optimizing spend management with leveraged business only pricing strategies. Today's discussion is all about uncovering new ways to make procurement not just efficient but truly strategic, especially when it comes to managing indirect spend and capturing value through innovative pricing models. Over the next forty minutes or so, we'll explore how business exclusive pricing models can transform the way organizations buy, helping procurement teams unlock immediate savings, improve compliance, and drive greater spend visibility. We'll also look at practical systems to embed these approaches into existing procurement systems and approval workflows and hear real world examples from the leisure and hospitality sector where teams are already using these strategies to great effect. So lots to talk about and not too much time to do it in. I'm very pleased to be joined today by a fantastic guest who brings valuable perspective to our conversation, Javier Caravantes, group procurement director at Parques Reunidos. Javier, thank you so much for being here today. Before we jump right into our discussion, perhaps you could just start by giving our audience a a a short introduction to you. Tell us a bit about your your career and your role. Sure. Sure. Thank you. So I've, I'm Javier Fernandez as as Tom was saying. I'm global procurement director, at Parked Granitos. I've been working in procurement for the last, eighteen years. So too many. I'm I'm gonna stop saying how many years, in in that I've been working, but, but, yeah, in procurement in many companies, leaders in their sectors such as Philip Morris, Accenture, and and many others. And, also based in different countries, I'm happy to be here and and share with with all of you, some of the ideas I have on this. Fantastic. Great. Well, if you're happy, Javier, let's let's jump straight into the the real crux of our conversation. I wanna start with just the the the well, the prospect, I suppose, of unlocking the value of of business only pricing. So from your perspective, how do business exclusive pricing models differ from those traditional supplier or catalog pricing? And where can organizations see the biggest gains? I think that there's, I mean, definitely, there are a lot of benefits in whatever is related to reaching, to a vast amount of of categories and putting a a lot of expense altogether. So at the end, the biggest gain probably is related with transparency and with control. The part of being able to to have a a view in whatever, in whatever things you are spending your money, and therefore ensure that you are complying with the budget. Ensure that you're not going to unauthorized suppliers. Ensure that whoever you're purchasing from, is, at least complying with the with the basic things required by yourself. Also, then being able to report all this information, into whatever sustainability reporting, regarding carbon footprint or or others, I think are are real big gains versus traditional supplier or capital pricing that are very much focused in whatever these, in whatever these suppliers able to offer, which is normally very limited. Absolutely. So from your experience then, what immediate savings and also, of course, long term strategic benefits would you say companies can expect to to gain when they start leveraging business only pricing at scale? I think that the most the most immediate savings that that will come from from this, are very much, as I said, related with with feasibility and with transparency. Of course, when you move to a longer term, then you are able to very much look in in how you can optimize this spend and look at, let's say, minimum, minimum orders, and look at alternative products that can allow you to save costs, etcetera, etcetera. But in the very beginning, definitely, there is a big part of controlling what your company is spending, especially in low price, items that normally go out of the radar of procurement and that therefore they are, they are at risk, of going to suppliers that you don't want to go or maybe that you're, paying much more money than you should be paying. Fantastic. And then moving on sort of and then looking slightly longer term, what may be long longer term strategic benefits can companies really expect? So so in the so in the long term, basically, I think that the big strategic benefit, that you have is related to what I was saying you on reporting. I think that one of the one of the issues that, that big corporations find is that whenever it comes to report, whether they are complying with the carbon footprint, with all the with all the international standards like RE 100 and SPTI and many others, is that there is kind of some control within the 20% of the spend, 20% of the supplier, sorry, that consolidate this eighty, twenty something spend. But for all the others, there is no control at all. These are minor purchases normally done by local teams, that do not report directly to procurement and that, you are not able to really comply, without these standards. Most of them up to now have been, inform, informative only, but this is definitely something that is going to change, in the short time. Whenever this changes, having a view on all your suppliers is going to be critical, and the only way to do it is to, go onto this kind of of suppliers that allow you to consolidate many that allow you to consolidate and to integrate, your marketplaces and and have visibility on them. Because trying to have everything go through procurement is never going to happen. Absolutely. Digging down that little bit deeper then, Javier, when it comes to really embedding leveraged pricing into procurement. What would you say best practices are for integrating those those marketplace and and leverage pricing into existing procurement workflows, approval chains, and and ERP systems as well? Well, I I think that's, it's not only it's not only a best practice. It's, it's a must. If you want to, have or to integrate our marketplace, you need to have some kind of integrated systems that allow you that not only allow you to put this marketplace, into reality, but most important, ensure that nothing is going out from these marketplaces. So whenever you still stay with a traditional manual approval of invoices, there you will have, absolute risk of, of all these small purchases not going through your marketplace and going to many other suppliers. The only way is if you need to approve every invoice. So at the end, whenever someone wants to go outside of this marketplace, they would have a big issue, and they would need extraordinary approvals, etcetera, etcetera. And this at the end will remove them for the from doing that. So, so having, either one sole ERP system with enough controls, either several, but ensuring that at the end, they consolidate into our workflow where the where the approval chains are fully clear and all of these goes through procurement and finance, is key to be able to integrate the marketplace and, most importantly, to put volume into this marketplace. At the end, the the difficult thing of a marketplace is not is not putting it in place. It's not integrating it. That's that's kinda simple. It's ensuring that it's being used in the way you want to use it and that all the spend that was going outside of the of the of the company or or of this marketplace is not going anymore, and this is where you need these kind of controls. And just following on from that, I suppose well, I've I've sort of seen, I suppose, from experience over the past twelve months, couple of years, these discussions about balance, you know, that word balance, balancing all you know, procurement leaders having to juggle all these various different factors, you know, in what has become a real sort of, I suppose, volatile environment to to operate in. So from from your point of view, how can those leaders balance compliance, efficiency, user adoption as well, especially when it comes to managing indirect spend categories? I think you you definitely need so there's a combination of these. No? So, first of all, whatever you put in place needs to be simple. If it is complicated, if it is far more simple, do the way they were doing. And, of course, it's always been going to be simpler. No? At the end, we are we are animals, animals of rules and of traditions, and we tend to do things the the way we used to do it in the past. But at the end, if it is more or less simple to use, like an like an Amazon business marketplace would be, then definitely, the adoption is going to be far easier. This on one side. Then, of course, on the part of the compliance, at the end, what you need is to have a as I was saying in, in your previous question, You need to have a clear rule of saying, okay, guys. You cannot go outside of this of this usage. Yes or yes. You need to follow, this rule. Combining the two of these, the efficiency will come. As far as they are used to, work, in this way that the adoption is high and that, for example, you remove all the timing that you currently have now with invoicing approvals of, several hundreds of of suppliers, reviewing the POs, having issues with them, and you just have one sole marketplace that is ensuring that things will happen the way it should be, that you get consolidated invoices, etcetera, etcetera, then efficiency will come. So it will come as soon as you are able to ensure the adoption and you put a clear compliance in place saying, guys, you can't do things differently as these. Fantastic. Now I wanna I wanna talk a little bit more, Javier, about, spend visibility and really driving that, in a sort of a modern day, procurement environment. Which tools or or analytics would you say are currently proving or from your perspective, you know, what you've seen at your company, what what's proving most effective in really tracking, benchmarking, and and optimizing spend across, of course, multiple categories and suppliers? I I think that, in here, you're speaking about different topics. Also, one one thing is how we track, how you track the spend. Second, how you benchmark. Third, how you optimize. Sure. Not not going to go on on, of course, on a on a on a full detailed approach of many tools that could allow you to do all of all of these things. Being simple, in tracking, at the end, there's no better tracker from your, to your spend than whatever is coming out of your ERP. Because in the ERP, it's all the spend. And then, of course, there can be many tools linked to it, but the source of the of the company spend is definitely what is being shown in the in the ERP tool. I mean, that way, it is key that you begin from this. And, also, it is key in order to whenever you have any kind of reporting related to the spend, you make sure that whatever you are reporting perfectly matches to whatever is happening with the ERP, which is one of the traditional issues of the of the procurement, of the procurement teams that tend to report information that is not matching with other areas of the company. So this is on the part of the tracking. On the part of the benchmarking, of course, there's the traditional way of benchmarking spend, which is, going on to the processes. But then there are many other specific tools in whatever are related to to IT categories. For example, where we have where we have tools that are able to to see whether your, the pricing you are paying for in a specific system is right or not and, many others. And, again, in here, I will not I will not dedicate a lot of time. But then in what is related to optimizing a spend, across multiple categories, here I come to the to the origin of our conversation. I think that, that, business only only pricing a business, exclusive pricing model or tool with an integrated marketplace is definitely a great way to optimize to optimize the spend. Because at the end, this is where you would have a need on working on a small spend. For the bigger spend, definitely, you go to the market, you search, several supplies, and that's the way you do it. But if you want to put focus on in all this state of spend that normally is out of the scope, having a marketplace, I think, is one of the best ways to optimize. Great stuff. Could you, Javier, I wonder, just sort of dig down a little bit deeper into some examples maybe of how sectors like leisure and hospitality in which, of course, you know, you're you're well positioned to to comment are really using spend visibility and and data insights to drive better procurement decisions. Can you maybe share some kind of success stories in that realm? Yeah. Well, I think one of the most news that we are that we are looking at is the is the potential use of artificial intelligence tools combined with, for example, our SharePoints in order to identify from the current invoices that we have what are referred to a same category. So try to see whether for buying whatever item, we are going to six different suppliers, and we are able to to consolidate that. And, definitely, this is this is one of the ways we are where we are trying to to have some, some data insights in whatever is related to, to procurement decision. On a bigger way, one that's traditional traditionally has been used at our at our company is whatever is related to any predictability models, on a sector like mine. I think that the most, important driver, of business success or not is the weather, which is, of course, highly unpredictable too. And, we've been working with a lot of, a lot of data insights to try to see which weather is coming in the in the coming days in order to see what is the potential, is the potential gain of the of the company. And in that way, use this to work with, suppliers to ensure that we do not oversize, for example, our business if the if the weather is not expected to be good, and therefore, we are not expected to have as many visitors as we have. Mhmm. Great. Great. Fantastic insight, Javier. I can confirm that the weather in The UK today is predictable because it is it is pouring with rain. So, and Yeah. Yeah. The the weather in The UK is is predictable. In Spain, normally, it is on the opposite side, but then days like today's surprises where we are having heavy rain, and we look to be like in UK. Absolutely. Yeah. You're you're you're joining us in that sense, today. Javier, I'm pleased to say we do have a couple of, presubmitted, questions from our audience, who are watching along today. First one is a good one there. So how would you say, mid sized organizations can start to explore that business only pricing model? And what's the best way to build a business case that gets buy in from from executives? I think that when it comes to midsize organization, it is even easier to explore these business only pricing models because, in fact, they are not very much used or they do not have so many resources to go into this minor spend. And it is a mess, and it is a a time consumption of people that is very relevant. In larger organization, this is very much divided between so many people that at the end is not so clear what is the optimization of going onto a kind of business only pricing models. In the case of minor companies where you where you have teams much more concentrated, definitely, I think that, that, it is very clear to show the benefit in the way that these people in the administration that were dedicated to running to small purchases, seeking all kind of, invoices to be received, etcetera etcetera. This, they need they can't stop doing that, and they would have this in in one whole system. So I think it's, it's definitely even easier for these kind of organizations to build this business case. Fantastic. I've got another one here, from our audience. How can procurement teams ensure that marketplace pricing aligns with negotiated supplier agreements without creating conflict? I I think that this is the trickier probably point in what is related to marketplace to marketplaces. So the tricky thing is it is clear that you can control, that you can perfectly control the the spend, that is being that is being spent, let's say, by your by your teams, it is clear that you can have visibility on whatever they do, but it is not clear whether this approach is bringing, savings at the end. And this is very much related not only with negotiated supplier agreements that are very much happening in larger contracts where you could where you would still respect the supplier agreements because probably you would directly source from them. But especially in the small purchases, you can have the potential conflict of, of the guys that were doing the purchases. Say, hey. But if I go in the marketplace, I'm paying twice the price that I would have if I go to my traditional supplier across the street. And in that way, it is very important to, show the value to say, this might happen in a few cases. Of course, if it happens anytime, then there is an issue with the marketplace. But, with big big marketplaces, this should not happen. But the thing is you need to be able to, show the value on an aggregated point of view. I'll say, independently of minor cases where cherry picking will be better, the saving in terms of time of all the administrative tasks that you are doing. And on top of that, the average pricing, which is better, really makes sense on going on a on a marketplace solution. Absolutely. Thank you, Javier. I wanna, just as we sort of near near the, the end of our conversation, wanna just kind of look ahead, I suppose, as we as we sort of, come towards the the end of 2025, look ahead to 2026. What's kind of next for you from your perspective from a from a procurement point of view? How do you really see the function evolving as we move into 2026? Are there any sort of trends or emerging technology that you're you're really looking out for that's gonna be, having a big influence? I mean, definitely, my evolution in 2026 will be winning the lottery and having this, and having this, this webcast next time in in Bahamas, in in the beach, and it's, not in not in Madrid. We can hope. We can hope. We can hope. That that that would be the real good evolution. If that doesn't happen, which for whatever thing, the chances are not so good, I think that the role that procurement would have in 2026 is bringing on the table whatever, artificial intelligence is able to bring. Once we are more and more, overpassing the first terror that was that was happening in okay. Artificial intelligence is here, but the results are not good. It's not as intelligent as it should be, etcetera, etcetera. I think that the evolution is already very good. Whatever you're able to do with Copilot, you're you're able to obtain a lot of information to consolidate information. It really acts as a kind of big data solution, and I think that procurement should be able to lead this, kind of big data implementation with AI within the company in what is related to to suppliers. Great stuff. And just finally, Javier, I wonder, you also referenced earlier your your longevity and procurement, you know, the number of years growing. I think you said sort of eighteen to twenty to twenty years in the in the profession. How do you still manage to sort of stay up to date with those procurement changes, you know, those best practices? How do you kind of keep up with it all? I I think that I think that it is absolute key to be in places like this and in in webinars like this. At the end, this part of reviewing your knowledge to ensure that you that you know, that what you know is up to date, to look for information, to to be prepared to whatever these questions are coming and, of course, go into different, to different first participating as a, as a speaker in in as many in as many forums as as possible. I think that all of these, allow you to be to be on, to be up to date. So so, yeah, in that way, I I really want to thank you because I think that, webinars like this are a are a great help for bigger than professionals like us. Fantastic. And we will, of course, be continuing to have, plenty more conversations such as this as part of our our series with, Amazon Business. I'm afraid for today, though, that is all we've got time for. My thanks to all of you, of course, for for watching today. And and Javier, we'll we'll speak again soon, no doubt, and and hopefully see you, at one of our procurement and supply chain live, events, whether that's in, in, Chicago or London or or somewhere else. We we shall see. The recording of our webinar will be available, very shortly. So if you so desire, you can come back and watch it all over again. You can also catch more webinars over on Procurement Magazine's website. Just head to procurementmagazine.com. But for now, thank you so much, all for watching. Bye bye for now.