Season 2 Episode 1: Celebrating 10 years with Amazon Business

Amazon Business is celebrating 10 years of growth, much of it driven and fueled by invaluable customer feedback. In our season two premiere of the Smart Business Buying Podcast, we’re joined by Ray Hsu, Executive Director of Procurement Services at University of Washington (UW), a day one customer. Ray shares insights on how UW and Amazon Business' collaboration has evolved over a decade and its impact across the university. Todd Heimes, VP of Small Business, Business Prime, and Marketing, also joins the conversation to take us back through memory lane on Amazon Business’ beginnings and its vision for the future.

Looking back on the early days

Amazon Business was founded with a clear mission: to solve purchasing challenges for businesses and organizations of all sizes.

“We've realized that businesses and organizations of all sizes really wanted the same things that consumers did. They wanted a massive selection with great prices and great value,” said Todd Heimes. “They wanted that delivery experience that they get from Amazon in their personal lives, but for work.”

University of Washington as an early adopter

The University of Washington was among Amazon Business’ first customers. Reflecting on how it started, Ray Hsu recalls “We wanted to manage the number of suppliers, get better visibility and transparency into these small transactions.”

Key themes from Ray and Todd’s conversation:

• How Amazon Business got started
• Impact on the university’s mission, staff, and students
• What the future holds for UW and Amazon Business

Transcript:

This has been lightly edited for clarity. 

[00:00:00 - 00:00:37]
Brit:
Hi there. Welcome to the Smart Business Buying podcast. I'm your host, Brit Moorer. Today we are marking a major milestone —  the 10th anniversary of Amazon Business.

To celebrate, we're joined by Ray Hsu, executive director of procurement services from the University of Washington, who's been part of the journey from the very beginning. And Todd Heimes, our VP of small business, Prime and, marketing, who really helped launch Amazon Business, been instrumental in shaping it into what it is today. Thank you both for joining us.

[00:00:37:23 - 00:00:38]
Ray: Thank you.

Todd: Thank you.

[00:00:38 - 00:00:49]
Brit:
Todd, I'm curious Amazon Business is ten years old, this really didn't come out of nowhere, right? This stemmed from something we were noticing about our customers.

[00:00:49 - 00:01:27]
Todd:
That's right. You know, for years, we noticed that businesses and different organizations were using their personal accounts to buy for work. And we started to ask ourselves really many, many years ago, oh, why can't they buy for work using the same easy experience that they have in their personal lives? So, you know, in classic Amazon fashion, we started to move as fast as we could and we knew we had to build something that went beyond just offering a vast selection of products at great prices.

[00:01:27 - 00:02:04]
Todd:
You know, we needed to build something that could address the unique purchasing challenges of different organizations, you know, while still fitting into each of their respective ecosystems. So that meant having things like tax compliant exemptions. It meant setting up corporate accounts with potentially thousands of users. And it also meant integrating into different e-procurement systems and many more sort of additional innovations on top of our sort of basic core consumer experience.

[00:02:04 - 00:02:31]
Todd:
So we tried a lot of different approaches. And some of the earlier ones failed, obviously. And, you know, that's fine. At Amazon, we like to, sort of iterate, fail fast, and try many different things. And so we did have a couple of, things that we tried in the early days and didn't quite work, but we continued to learn from each one of those, improving on each iteration.

[00:02:31 - 00:02:42]
Todd:
And finally, in 2015, we did land on a model that worked, and, that was Amazon Business. And, you know, we continue to evolve that with our customers ever since.

[00:02:42 - 00:02:56]
Brit:
Perfect. And we'll get into just that model and why it initially worked, especially for customers like the University of Washington in just a little bit. But I want to know, Todd, can you walk us through what really drove the decision to launch Amazon Business?

[00:02:56 - 00:04:55]
Todd:
Yeah. You know, we've realized that businesses and organizations of all sizes really wanted the same things that consumers did. They wanted a massive selection with great prices and great value. They wanted that delivery experience that they get from Amazon in their personal lives, they really wanted the Amazon experience, but for work.

And so that's what we built. We gave them an experience on Amazon Business that has access to hundreds of millions of items with great sharp prices and a world class delivery experience. We also built a bunch of different features, which we can get into in a little bit.

But one of them that I'm super proud of is Business Prime. Business Prime is our version of consumer Prime, and it really unlocks the similar sort of benefits that you get on your consumer site. So, for example, fast free shipping for all of the users in your account. So that can be a huge cost savings for our customers.

And then we also have a number of different benefits associated with the Business Prime program. And so organizations of all sizes, we have five different plans, one for sole proprietors all the way up to the largest organizations and institutions in the world.

Customer wise, we have 8 million business customers worldwide, which is, it's been a growing number every year. And, you know, we're just excited about what we can do in for at Amazon Business for our, business customers all over the world.

[00:04:44 - 00:04:59]
Brit:
Perfect. Thank you. It's exciting to hear. Or just get that peek behind the curtain of how this all came to be, especially with those the people and the customers who've been with us since the beginning. We'll chat with one of those folks. We have Ray here to dive into the University of Washington's experience and and how we've been able to collaborate together.

[00:05:00 - 00:05:11]
Ray:
When we're first looking at Amazon Business, I think at one point in time, correct me on this - Amazon supplies before 2015 had gone through a few iterations of changes of branding and so forth.

[00:05:12 - 00:05:55]
Todd:
That's correct, that's correct. As I mentioned, we tried a lot of different things. You know, many, many years ago, we tried something called corporate accounts. That was one thing that we tried, and then you're right. Our first effort, Amazon business, we called it Amazon Supply. And, we moved into Amazon Business. We worked on that for a little bit and launched it in April of 2015.
And I think you were one of our first customers.

Ray:
Yes. Yes, I think so. It was a pleasure to be part of the initial sort of discovery and really the, be part of the evolution of the Amazon Business. To answer the original question, what we're looking for back in 2015, and we know some little back then, but three things.

[00:05:55 - 00:07:40]
Ray:
One is we want to do an intelligent way to manage our, what we call, tail spend. As I mentioned, we're a R1 research institution. We buy million dollars research equipment, diagnostic equipment, genome science equipment and so forth. So we buy a lot of that. We also buy a lot of supplies. Things are low cost and low profile and low risk and so forth, but those purchases are all over the place, literally we have thousands and thousands of our suppliers gumming up our system. We have no idea how we're spending our money. Where are we buying them from? And there's no governance. And you know, people just buy them anywhere on the web and then submit their card for reconciliation. So we want a centralized and put it on a common platform that we can manage. We can get better transparency and visibility on exactly what is happening in this.

So that's number one. We wanted to manage the number of suppliers, get better visibility and transparency into these small transactions. And lastly there's a saying they say we want an Amazon like experience, Amazon like experience. Well we'll figure let's just go to the real thing. Let's go to Amazon and bring this to campus. And I will say back in 2015, we're one of the first university that took this bold step, because a lot of universities at the time was looking at us and say, are you guys sure this is the right move to go?

My boss at the time, Mark Connelly, who was the then executive director, we want to bring this to our customers on the University Academy because we feel that this is, a value that we can bring as an organization. And ten years later, I think we have done just that and many more. And we'll get into the details later.

[00:07:40 - 00:07:57]
Brit:
Thank you. Yeah. No way. You kind of spoke to this a little bit about the processes that you are you had in place pre Amazon business. Can you dive in a little more. Because obviously I'm assuming slowed things down a bit. Or maybe you weren't even aware just you know the lack of efficiencies maybe in some areas. Can you explain that a little more.

[00:07:57 - 00:09:58]
Ray:
Exactly. So imagine if you're a college administrator and you're managing the drama department and your scene shop needs to find these ten different things to outfit your next production and so forth. Imagine how many different sources or websites that you got to go find to find costumes, supplies, other things for that use case. Centralize that platform right. Amazon that you can find everything that you need in one place.

So that's an efficiency that I can bring to the campus to centralize that buying experience. To Todd's really good point, we know the pricing. We know the discount that we can get. And we know exactly what the lead time is. And it tracks your order from beginning to end so you know you can manage the logistics. You know, Amazon is a world class logistical company.. You know, on top of everything else you do. So we have a very clear idea about where the product is at any point of that journey. And so this way allows you to say, hey, we got a problem next Wednesday, but this thing will be here next Monday that's going to meet our schedule, or we need to pivot. Change to a different product because the lead comes through. And then later on, Prime came, which even speed up the delivery. But initially, yeah, we want to centralize all these. What we call till end spend or tail spend to one centralized platform. On top of that, we wanted a way to manage the buying policy. So each colleges, universities, schools can set up their own buying policy to manage the way they buy that makes sense for them.

And then in accordance with their policy. So an administrator can look at all the orders that's placed by that unit and do some analysis. Hey, we should be consolidating some of these purchase. So without that common platform and that level of transparency, we were just flying blind in a lot of places. So hopefully that answered the question.

[00:9:59 - 00:11:39]
Todd:
It's such a great story, right?
I mean we hear it. We've heard it from many different customers in many different industries. But what you're describing is just it's really the essence of why we built Amazon Business. You had so many suppliers, you gave the example of the drama department, but you could probably come up with 20 different examples of, you know, just so many different suppliers that you're working with.

Amazon Business cannot replace all of those suppliers, of course, but there's so much selection available on our marketplace, it can greatly reduce the number of suppliers. And then getting that visibility that you need. You know, one of the, one of the first value prop taglines that we used at Amazon Business was everything you love about Amazon, now for your business. And that's that's really what we focused on building in those early days was, use a great experience that you're used to outside of work and then get access to a massive amount of selection. You mentioned tail spend. You know, so many times we, we talk to procurement professionals and tail spend isn't necessarily the thing they want to focus on.

You know, there's of course, there's a ton of really important things that procurement teams work on working with big suppliers, big contracts, tail spend sometimes doesn't make the cut, but it is such a leaky bucket in such an inefficient area of spend. So, you know, for for us, we love tail spend because it's something that we can really help our customers with every day.

[00:11:40- 00:11:42]
Ray:
Well said. Thank you. Yeah, that's a great point. Thank you.

[00:11:43 -00:12:07]
Brit:
And a theme that I'm also hearing is flexibility, increasing that the wiggle room there. Right. Doing what you need to do, whether it's buying for the drama department or different areas of the business and and having a solution that can kind of help you and navigate through all of that. I think that that's what I'm hearing there.

I'm curious, was there a moment where you're like, yes, this collaboration is working? It is. I'm getting what I'm need, I need from this collaboration.

[00:12:08- 00:14:11]
Ray:
There are many those moments, obviously I cannot pinpoint one single instance. Where is it? It's a it's a journey. It's a I think it's a relationship that you grow over time. But I think especially, I will point to doing a terrible time, Covid time, where everyone was sent home. You have to work remotely starting next week, can come into the office, but you still need to perform your function. So how are we going to get the supplies and equipment that people need to their home? We had a procurement platform at the time, but unfortunately due to system limitation, the supplier that's on the procurement platform can only deliver to a University of Washington address, not to my garage, not to my study. Amazon solved that problem for us. You know, office supplies, computer accessories, some computer hardware printers and things like that. We were able to timely and accurately get the supplies to the, to the end users' possession. We have to develop policies to make sure that these equipment are still accountable under a university licensed inventory.

But once we solve that problem, Amazon was the perfect answer for it. And other suppliers trying to catch up, to pivot and change the way to do business. Amazon had that right out of the box, and I have more than one administrator ready. If we did not have Amazon at the time, I don't know how I would fit my offices, you know, in these different locations because we couldn't just come into the office to pick up the thing. Right. It was under, if you remember, strict rules. So you can't come into the office. You have to be masking. You have to have all your data. So there was a lot of trouble to get supplies. And Amazon solved that problem for us.

So that's one instance where I said if we didn't have the solution in place at the time, obviously is at a at a great cost to everyone, but it solve a very challenging, business issue for us. And, that that will be one, I think just one example I can give and say yeah, this really works.

And it works in a way that we didn't imagine it to work and so forth, you know.

[00:14:11 - 00:14:13]
Brit:
Yeah. No, that's a powerful example. Did you want to add on to that?

[00:14:14 - 00:14:50]
Todd:
Well, I, you know, Covid it was such a difficult time for all of us, but it was a great opportunity for us, Amazon Business and our customers to work together to figure out how to come up with new innovative solutions and that, that work from home change was quite a time of innovation, really for AB, you know, and now we have many return to office examples. So we're kind of on the, on the other end of that. And, it continues to be a journey for us.

[00:14:50 - 00:17:44]
Ray: Absolutely.

Brit:
Forever a journey. I'm curious to know, like that transition, you know, we had to work from home transition. Now, you know, return to office. And and I want to know, were there any specific products or product features that really stood out to you that you were like, hey, this is really changing the game for us and how we operate?

Ray:
Yeah. One thing I would really point out is the, the analytics tool that is an intuitive platform and visualization of information that I can have a conversation with my boss and say, here's how we're doing here at a glance and so forth. And also it's a, it's a tool that allows our department personnel to say, hey, how are we spending our money in Amazon within any time period?

How's our adherence to buying policies. Right. For example, we had a policy that, we wanted to push up the preference for a sustainable product. How are we adhering to that? So it gives us a metric about how well we're doing against that. And is there anything we need to do to communicate that need and so forth? And also, I think just provide the saving opportunity. I think the the metrics also save under Amazon Prime. You're saving X amount of dollars under shipping and so forth. That's a value proposition that I can talk about all day long to set. It's a small investment in a membership.

And, but imagine the time and the cost saving, the latest, you know, feature and you know, we just implement it at the University of Washington is last mile delivery. So centralize all that delivery into one place utilizing our mailing services team who's wonderful and being amazing to stood up this program. To further, I think, enhance the customer experience to making sure that their product is delivered accurately and timely because University of Washington, if you ever been to our campus? It's a beautiful campus, but it's got a lot of historical and complex buildings, and not all drivers from outside knows the in and out of these complex. Our mailing services knows every building by heart and so forth. So we're putting the responsibility of delivering, making sure the customer get their product on time to the people that really need it.

And this is I think it's a cost saving and and efficiency for Amazon. No longer will your driver need to figure all these little buildings. They all deliver by pallet to one location. Our people break it down and deliver them to the rightful owners of these places. And everyone walk away very satisfied. I think we, met requirement on both sides.


This allows Amazon to focus your energy and resources elsewhere. Innovation, other things and so forth, and our people will take care of the last mile. So there's a couple of example. We always say these are features and programs and initiatives that really help. Again the goal is really to enhance the customer experience and so forth.

[00:17:44 - 00:19:19]
Brit:
Right.

Todd:
No question that campus is beautiful

Brit:
Right.

Ray:
Thank you. Thank you I like to think so. Yes. Right.

Todd:
Those are some great features that you mentioned. I think Guided Buying also is a is a key feature that you guys use. And we see that across so many customers, you know, and that work from home really Guided Buying became a key part of that as well. Because you're allowed to enable, a policy where you can really guide your users to buy the things that you want them to buy.

Ray:
Exactly.

Todd:
You know, and actually, you know, sort of a hotly debated topic at Amazon early on, you know, hotly debated topics we use at Amazon to kind of work through difficult decision that we're trying to make from a product perspective, you know, so we'll we'll talk about the pros and the cons and then a recommendation.

And in this case, you know, we like I said earlier, we have, you know, hundreds of millions of items for sale, which is great for customers, but not always when you're trying to guide end users to buy from a specific type of product. We may have hundreds of, safety gloves, but you only want your users to buy one of, you know, five.

So Guided Buying will allow you to put that type of policy in place. Guide those users. You mentioned, sustainable products. I think that's another great use case. By local etc., you know, so anyway, guided buying, I think, was at the core of how you enabled your users to use AB.

[00:19:20 - 00:20:11]
Ray:
Absolutely. They can they can search across your very diverse set of products but adhere to a standardization process.
If the department said yeah, to your point, we only want to buy these five products, you can kind of shape that that behavior and shape that choices and say, yeah. And another thing is you don't you may not always want to name brand stuff. You say, you know, I, I think this computer cable, I'm good with Amazon Basic.

Right. And there's a considerable cost saving to that and so forth. So offer them their choices to pick from a name, brand, product or Amazon Basic. We just ask this, but but at a considerable lower price point and so forth. So that kind of opportunity for the customer to make a intelligent buying, smart buying decision, I think is a key thing. So Guided Buying and also that wide selection and but the price comparison.

[00:20:12 - 00:21:00]

Todd:
So for those two things together, that big selection, and this concept of Guided Buying policies. Absolutely. And it was hotly debated at Amazon because, you know, for for our consumer business, we really believe in giving all the selection available to customers and let them discover, and buy what they want, you know, discover the things they didn't even know they needed.

Ray:
Right.

Todd:
But when we talk to procurement professionals like yourself, we know that's not always the case. Like, we have rules. We have policies. We want to put in place so that our users buy kind of more of what we want them to buy.

Ray:
Absolutely.

Todd:
And so that was a big debate. Like, should we take away that freedom of choice? And when we're working with our procurement, partners, we know we need to do that.

Ray:
I'm glad you made that choice.

[00:21:00 - 00:21:21]
Brit:
Now that's what it's about, the conversations, right? I'm curious. We we talked a little bit about this, social responsibility. And I want to know, you know, just the importance of having the collaboration with Amazon Business. How are you able to bring to life the university social responsibility goals and making sure you're doing good for the community?

[00:21:22 - 00:23:04]
Ray:
I think one of the best thing that I enjoyed, in working with Amazon solution is it is so easy to do something like that. It did not take a lot of heavy communication, directive, because as you know, in college campus, when you start doing that campus. Yeah. Thank you very much. We're going to do exactly that so we build that sort of inherently in and as part of the ecosystem, deploy a couple of thoughtfully designed buying policy, business diversity supporting local businesses. But we put that into the background. So when they do a search, it just, searches according to your setting.

Another thing we talk about is sustainable products. And so for there's a there's a buying policy where you can specifically set that up. So when people are searching for it, they didn't even know that they're searching for a sustainable product. It just comes up as part of their search results. And so and they can still have a choice not to buy from it, but it comes up in such a high, visible place.

They say, hey, this is very clearly marked to be sustainable product. Right. So that is, you know, business diversity and sustainability are two key institutional initiatives at the University of Washington. So we obviously communicate that all the way from the president to the border region to our constituents across the campus. And here's a tool that allows them to do just that without really them doing a whole lot of thinking about it.

It's just there every day searching for product. These things are supporting the policy. Without them constantly even. No, I think that's the beauty of, not a whole lot of fanfare is just you build that in the background and make it really easy for your customer to make the right choice and so forth.

[00:23:04 - 00:23:37]
Todd:
Yeah, I love the way you talk about that. You know, in our personal lives, we may want to buy from sustainable products or, different types of sellers. But when we talk to larger customers, whether or not that's, public institutions or private companies, they usually have goals that they need to try to hit to buy from whether or not it's sustainable or different sort of diverse sellers.

And this tool set really allows them to hit those goals. Right.

[00:23:38 - 00:24:24]
And furthermore, on the dashboard in the business analytics, I can see the metrics of how we're doing on a quarterly basis or on a monthly basis, how successful we are. And again, this is doing without customer consciously doing anything. But as an administrator, I can look at the the success and I can communicate that accordingly to the stakeholders.

Hey look at this. This is what we're doing. I presented this to the Arbor region and they love the idea. So how do we turn that on? Do we have to hire a consulting firm to of us? Guess. Well, I just save you maybe millions of dollars. It was built in as a native functionality. So thank you, Todd, for, making that part of the out of the box experience for us all.

We do just click yes, and we're, in business, so forth, you know.

[00:24:24 - 00:24:44]
Brit:
And this conversation so exciting to me because we're hearing, you know, direct from you, from University of Washington and how you're implementing all of the solutions that Amazon Business has. And I'm curious to know, Todd, from your vantage point, how important is the feedback, especially from early adopters like UW, to really help shape what Amazon business is today?

[00:24:45 - 00:26:49]
Todd:
Yeah, well, I love hearing from Ray. And, and so many of the examples that you're giving are just, they're spot on with what we intended to do with this product. So it's great to hear from you. You know, that's that is core to the DNA at Amazon is listening to our customers. You know, customer obsession is one of our main leadership principles.

And so we have tried over the years to listen to our customers, in the early days of Amazon business. And we continue to do that today because we know that listening to our customers continues to give us new ideas on how to evolve the product. And and truthfully, we love hearing these great stories. But even more important is for us to hear about the things that are not working.

You know, we spend most of our time with customers trying to identify those things where we could do better because that really helps us evolve the product and build the best for our customers. You know, University of Washington was one of our first education customers and really almost from day one. Right. And it's been such a pleasure to support and grow the relationship together.

You know, with over 8 million customers today in really every industry and every size of business and organization, it's really important for us to continue to focus on customer obsession. You know, hearing from early adopters like yourself really helps us really spot those gaps and figure out where to continue to innovate and build better.

You know, whether or not that's, continuing to improve the areas where you guys use Amazon Business or continuing to build better tax solutions and invoice solutions and, bulk delivery solutions. These are all some of the things that we're really, focused on today trying to make, even a bigger impact for our business buyers.

[00:26:50 - 00:27:02]
Brit:
And we're looking ahead to also thinking about the future and what's next. Ray, I'm curious, for the next five years, what are UW's priorities and how is Amazon Business kind of helping you align on those priorities?

[00:27:03 - 00:30:11]
Ray:
Yeah, no. So right now, as a lot of my peers across the higher education spectrum and so forth, we're dealing with, in, in, in various degrees, budget challenges. So the, the need to, cut costs or be more smarter about the way that we spend our resources is utmost important. So Amazon's a great tool to help us do that to exactly to your point, the guide to buying the shopping tool, the smart buying things and to, to implement policy I think is and key and also the ability to, bring efficiency to processes, you know, the I think that's key, right, for, you know, so, to, to a very good point, Todd. There's things that we can spend a lot of time negotiating to contractors, but these things that we bought on Amazon should be fairly intuitive, fairly automatic and so forth. So offering a platform like that for our university customers is most important. So they, they don't have to really focus their energy.

They can just, conduct their business, support their operations in the way that they have been and so forth. So that's one, number two, another priority for us is to, eventually bring Amazon as part of our e-procurement platform. We're working through a few details, and that's an ongoing conversation that are working with your team and so forth.

So that's a ongoing conversation. But at some point, we like to make Amazon a more integrated supplier. Right now, you're, living sort of aside using p-card. But the eventual goal is to kind of bring you as a more integrated supplier. But there's a lot of logistics we need to work through, so I'm confident we can get there in the very near future.

And then lastly, I think just continue on the success of what we do right now. The example I give is, the last mile delivery. We're about to launch to a centralized receiving, program for Seattle, Bothell, and Tacoma campuses. How do we leverage that type of innovation and, consolidation and process and partner with Amazon to say, how do we again, make the delivery and the, the customer experience even better, you know, utilizing what we're doing, partner with Amazon.

And then we also want to look at, Amazon lockers on campuses. You know, we have a huge population of student that, live on campus, you know, and they are shoppers of Amazon, every one of them to outfit their dorm rooms and, and what have you. How do we again, intuitively and safely and actually get the product to our a student population who is just, you know, one of our core customers.

You know, that's another thing that's not directly under my purview, but we here we are here to serve the campus community, including our faculty, staff and students and so forth. So how do we partner with a solution provider like Amazon to to make that experience better? And there's many other example I can get, but I also just feel that that I can give, at a quick moment to see how would this kind of fit into our, our horizon and some of the things we're trying to accomplish in the next couple of years.

[00:30:12 - 00:30:20]
Brit:
Okay, I was about to ask you timeline because I'm like, all right, I'm sure you know, the students would be excited about the lockers especially. So, that's all exciting.

[00:30:21 - 00:32:08]
Todd:
We love, I love the comment about, e-pro system. You know, that's a, as I mentioned, I think earlier that we know that Amazon Business becomes part of an ecosystem right? That each of our customers and really the larger customers most do have an e-pro system that really ties into their ERP system. And it's all tied together. And you can use Amazon Business like UW does, as a standalone solution. But we also integrate with, you know, all of the major e-procurement systems. And once you're in there, then you're able to really now you start really seeing some great efficiencies where everything flows through.

You can still use guided buying. You can still use the analytics tool, but you're going to even realize greater efficiencies once we get into that e-pro system ecosystem.

The other thing I thought we should maybe talk about a little bit is the potential to use Amazon Business beyond tail and into what we refer to more as managed spend.

You know, I'm sure UW has a huge amount of, you know, major managed spend purchases. And that's really a place where Amazon Business today is investing to get better at delivering in larger quantities, even with, necessary services tied to some of the products, so that we can continue this journey with University of Washington, but also with many other customers really moving, from tail into more of that managed spend environment, which is, I'm sure a huge part of your purview.

[00:32:09 - 00:33:37]
Ray:
Yeah. In fact, you already are. You just didn't know it. So I'll give you a couple examples. Computer supplies. That is a managed spend. And, you know, I in the last number I tracked you're inching up to one of the other major suppliers. And so you're, you're inching up in your presence in this area, another, area JanSan. And janitorial supply and things like that, that's typically, purchased outside of Amazon. But more and more people are going into Amazon because all the reason we talked about to say, hey, you know, this is actually easier to do, we can subscribe, we can buy bulk, we can get that same price saving, but then we can also get that product visibility and transparency that may not be offered by our, you know, some of your competitor and so forth.

So and this is without me telling them that you have to do this is just organically people are, making the smart buy decisions whether it is against our established contract or within Amazon. We have a robust contract with Amazon. So that's, that's, you know, goes by saying, but I think the the University of Washington customers are smart.

They will make the best decision. They will go to the solution that gives them the best experience and so forth. So again, the I think the point is make it easy for them and they will sort of adopt the solution that makes, you know, so it's it's a it's the thing that I already see happening. But yeah, to your point, Todd, we can definitely develop and evolve more in that area.

[00:33:38 - 00:33:58]
Todd: 
That's great. That's our that's our, newest campaign is Smart Business buying. Because we do believe that, you know, bringing all of the data and the selection and the delivery experience together, is really it's a kind of a no brainer. And it's a smart buying decision.

[00:33:59 - 00:34:11]
Brit:
And Todd, you kind of touched on some of the trends and what you're seeing in terms of, you know, the direction for Amazon Business. I'm curious, is there something you're just really excited about, passionate about as we think about what's to come?

[00:34:12 - 00:35:31]
Todd: 

We do see this continued shift happening in the industry. As I just said, smart business buying, we believe, has a really big future, you know, purchasing departments, really. And all of our customers, they want to get smarter. They want delivery to be faster, and they want to, make procurement more of a strategic function in their organizations. And so we continue to really see that shift happening. And I've been involved with this business now for the last ten years. And, we I still see a huge opportunity remaining, both within Amazon Business but also within our customers, you know, kind of to, continue to look at the use of, of big data.
Now we have, really, you know, so much going on with generative AI, so much technology at our fingertips now to automate and to build, better products that really help our customers get insights, help them really use automation and, to, to use AB to, I think, accomplish more of their goals each and every day.

[00:35:33 - 00:37:04]
Brit:
What tips would you give other universities really looking to choose and build long term supplier partnerships?

Ray:
Yeah. Thank you, Brit. I think the chances are, if we're talking about Amazon Business, their customers is already buying from Amazon, but most likely in a decentralized and unmanaged fashion. So my, suggestion will be centralize that management into one centralized platform.

Set up sound thoughtful and intuitive policy. So to my earlier point, make it really easy for the customer. So it's not a conscious decision is just part of their everyday buying experience and so forth. And lastly, making sure that you have a ongoing dialog and with your Amazon team, they bring earth a lot of good ideas and really sound suggestions to, to say how we can, make this experience better for both the customer and for the management, the administrators of this thing.

So listen to the solution provider who's an expert in this area, listen to their suggestion and implement those suggestions when it makes sense to you. And lastly, look at any opportunity to consolidate any processes that could be done through Amazon and so forth. You know, instead of, you know, the product selection, the smart buying, the last mile delivery, any opportunity to consolidate and put these response be at the the right resource to manage I think will be a good sound decision for people to do.

[00:37:05 - 00:37:38]
Brit:
Perfect. I love ending on that note, I feel like we could just chat for for hours about this and learning more, particularly about the University of Washington story, which has been really exciting. So thank you both so much for the stories and the insights today. Appreciate it.

Todd:
It's been fantastic. Thank you Ray.

Ray:
Thank you.

Brit:
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