Amazon Business today announced the winners of the first-ever Amazon Business Awards which saw leading companies like Cepsa, Walsall Council and ABB bagging the trophies. The award ceremony took place at this week’s Amazon Business Exchange (ABX) in London, the company’s first business customer conference in Europe.
“These awards recognize three of our most innovative, agile and visionary business customers. We’re excited to see procurement teams enable more modern ways of working as they drive greater employee and organization productivity across the board, improve operating effectiveness and play a key part in achieving greater business agility and velocity.”
– Todd Heimes, director of Amazon Business Europe and host of ABX.
The ABX Awards winners of 2019
The User Empowerment Award: Cepsa
Cepsa is a global energy company which operates in an integrated way with all the phases of the hydrocarbon value chain. The company fabricates products from raw materials of vegetable origin and has a presence in the renewable energies sector. It is present in the five continents through its business areas of Exploration, Production, Refining, Chemicals, Merchandising, Gas, Electricity and Trading.
They were the first Amazon Business customer in Spain and are focused on making the end-user experience as easy as possible to enable buyers to get what they need, where and when they want, reducing their administrative process time significantly.
Cepsa is particularly notable for their investment in process changes on the procurement
side that further ease resource load – including creating robotic process automation (RPA) to better enable access to selection and building automated processes to download analytics and invoices.
“Our objective is to make procurement simple, agile and efficient, focused on the needs and experiences of our users. By integrating Amazon Business, we were able to automate the end-to-end process, empower our users to manage their tail spend themselves and,
at the same time, noticeably reduce the time it takes to do this.”
– José Antonio Valganón, chief procurement officer, Cepsa.
The Agile Procurement Award: Walsall Council
Walsall Council is a local authority government organization in the UK. As part of the council’s transformation programme, where it aims to “achieve better outcomes and customer experience, increase staff satisfaction and engagement, and improve service efficiency and performance”. Finance and procurement were given a mandate from their Executive Director: to leverage technology to drive better employee engagement.
Moving with urgency, it contacted Amazon Business and was able to launch its account in three days from initial discovery to go-live. Walsall Council was able to achieve its employee engagement goals with Amazon Business’s easy-to-use, convenient experience, as well as increasing visibility and management over their total spend.
Amazon Business and Walsall Council worked together to ensure VAT invoice visibility for end users and provide business analytics to track spend down to individual and category levels.
“We are going through a major transformation program, with a focus on digitalization. We implemented Amazon Business in just three days. It is great that the effort both sides have put into setting this up so quickly is being recognized.”
– James Walsh, executive director, resources and transformation, Walsall Council.
The Visionary Award: ABB
ABB is a technology leader that is driving the digital transformation of industries. With a history of innovation spanning more than 130 years, ABB has four customer-focused, globally leading businesses: Electrification, Industrial Automation, Motion, and Robotics and Discrete Automation, supported by the ABB Ability™ digital platform.
To work toward the vision of scaling procurement in today’s world to meet the users’ expectations, ABB scaled their Amazon Business account over 42 legal entities and have been able to reduce free text orders by up to double-digit, whilst increasing the end-user satisfaction in the buying process. What made ABB the winner of this year’s Visionary Award is the ambition to ensure a buying population of over 1,400 users across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Poland have access to the account as well as having an account open in the US.
“In our fast-moving world today, and especially within such a digital-first company like ABB, it’s all about user experience. Our vision is to empower our internal client with quick
self-service through modern technology by connecting our existing eProcurement solution with Amazon Business. Having small value items on a single website, in a consolidated fashion, provides users with a very simple and lean experience, which significantly increases our operational efficiency.”
– Sven Eisel, lead procurement and logistics business partner Germany and France Hub, the main driver of the Amazon Business implementation at ABB.
