Molly Dobson, Amazon Business Amazon Business Exchange (ABX) returns this year in its virtual format to bring together heads of procurement and supply, finance, and representatives from Amazon Business and its customers for a morning of ideas, learnings and experience exchange. Following the theme of purchasing transformation, a series of keynotes, panel discussions and customer experience stories will unveil how you can drive greater savings, with speed, and add value to your organization by using the latest in digital purchasing technology.
Amazon Business has made this a free-to-attend event, spanning just one morning so that sessions can be on point, succinct and deliver tangible actions that you can take away to make an impact on your organization, quickly. The event begins soon, but there is still time to join for 9am BST (10am CEST) finishing at 11am BST (12pm CEST) on Tuesday October 5th. Register for free here.
They’ve packed a lot into the two-and-a-half hours, with a lineup of speakers who have experienced purchasing transformation first-hand — in both the private and public sectors — and who are ready to share their learnings with anyone embarking on a similar journey. We’ll also be hearing from the experts at Amazon Business who have experience in driving their customers’ successes, one of which is the UK/Ireland country manager Molly Dobson.
Dobson has led the Amazon Business team that looks after the interests of the larger, more complex enterprise customers, and has transitioned into a more general management role at country level to bring her and her team even closer to the local customer, while offering support to multinationals with a UK/Ireland presence.
“I’m delighted to have been able to grow my career at Amazon Business,” she told Spend Matters, “because while we’ve achieved so much in the past few years, we have really only just begun. There are so many exciting new opportunities ahead,” and of course, some of those you’ll be able to hear about at the event.
The customer voice
We’ll be hearing from Dobson throughout the morning as she introduces and talks to various customers about their experiences. The great thing about Dobson is that she comes from both the buy- and the sell-side of the business, so she can really get to grips with customers’ challenges.
During the opening keynote she’ll be talking with the CPO of Capita, Shahzad Saleem, and VP Digital Talent & Supply, Mark Smith at bp, so we can expect to hear the customer voice right from the start of the day, setting the scene for following sessions. She’ll also be introducing Cheryl Clifford who is Head of Professional Services at Amazon Business to lead a Q&A between the panel, weaving in her knowledge of current automated purchasing processes, identifying cost-saving opportunities and overseeing program execution, including resource assignment. She’ll be asking questions about the journeys they’ve been on in the past year.
“It’s good to get the customer voice upfront,” Dobson said. “In early-stage conversations with our customers it’s common for them to want to ask whether we have other customers with similar requirements to themselves that they can talk to and learn from, and we believe it’s good to facilitate those conversations.”
She’s also excited to be hearing from Phil Le-Brun, Director of Enterprise Strategy and Evangelism at AWS.
“He’s such an interesting speaker,” Dobson said. “He has had broad exposure to leading change management initiatives with customers and has adopted a really clear mental model that he shares with customers when talking about digital transformation. It’s one of the great concepts we all talk about a lot, but do we ever really consider what it is we’re transforming and what it actually means in practice? Phil looks deeper than the tools and solutions we need towards ‘a way of working’ and what is required to make that succeed. He’ll walk through a methodology and approach that he’s taken with existing customers and get under the bonnet of a framework that can help change your transformation project.”
In another session we’ll be hearing from the public sector side of the Amazon Business customer base.
“It’s interesting because it’s a very different buying experience from the private sector,” she said, “with so many legal requirements to be met. But it’s fantastic that we have more public sector organizations openly talking to each other about how they’ve navigated the pandemic.”
One such is NHS Leeds Teaching Hospital, whose Systems Development Manager, Benjamin Womack, will share how the organization tackled the procurement issues that came up in the health industry during the pandemic and the tools they used to help overcome the problems.
“We get a lot of great ideas from engagements with our public sector customers,” she said, “and we have a lot to learn from them to help shape our solution to be fit-for-purpose.”
So we can expect a great mix of voices at ABX, but we are particularly interested in one of the themes of the morning that complements Spend Matters’ recent attention to ESG issues and technology.
Purchasing more sustainable products
Amazon Business has launched a feature that helps customers find and buy products with sustainability certifications to help advance their sustainability goals. Amazon has partnered with trusted third-party certifications and created its own certification, Compact by Design, to guide buyers to products that meet sustainability standards.
“Our Climate Pledge at Amazon Business is something we don’t just want to talk about, and while we have climate-friendly products on site, we have now released a feature that allows buyers to set their preferences aligned to climate-friendly products,” Dobson told us. “They can also use the analytics tools we’ve made available to understand what proportion of their spend is going towards those climate-friendly products and quantify the impact that their spend is having on their sustainability goals.
“We’re really excited about this because it’s a conversation we know organizations are having, but they don’t often bring the buyer’s voice to the table. So we are now seeing leaders bringing procurement into these strategic conversations — organization-wide. It’s just the start of what we’re doing on the ESG front, creating tools and capabilities so that customers can drive their own sustainability agenda."
Dobson also addressed the pandemic disruption and and the current state of business.
“We don’t know what the new normal is,” Dobson said, “a year ago we would have thought very differently about where we’d be in 12 months’ time — but here we are, still facing uncertain times. Many organizations are still in a hybrid working situation, and we are all still adapting to that, which makes buying efficiently a challenge. What we do know is that using digital tools will be critical to making that hybrid environment work.”
ABX is starting soon — October 5th, 9am BST (10am CEST), but you can register right up to the hour, register for free here.
A note on Q&A
Owing to the short timeframe, ABX isn’t able to answer delegate questions during the event. But do come armed with your questions pertaining to any of the sessions or case studies to submit online, as Amazon Business has offered to come back to you within 48 hours. Not many events offer this kind of customer-tailored Q&A.
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Amazon Business Exchange — Get ready for purchasing transformation - Spend Matters
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