How This Real Estate Company Streamlined Purchasing, Optimized Costs, and Enhanced Spending Visibility With 1,500 team members across 260 sites, ease and efficiency were top priorities.

About a year ago, Mallory Hoffmeyer faced a situation that many growing businesses can relate with: a lack of control, visibility, or insight into procurement spending across a sprawling organization.

Hoffmeyer serves as Senior Director of Procurement at RangeWater Real Estate, a fully integrated real estate firm founded in 2006. The company specializes in multi-family and build-to-rent properties, providing development, property management, acquisition, and investment management services. RangeWater operates throughout the Sunbelt and Mountain West regions in the US, with physical offices in Atlanta and Dallas and employing roughly 1,500 team members across 260 sites.

With each site requiring a regular supply of items on hand, "RangeWater's properties require constant restocking of office supplies, event and marketing items, and janitorial materials," says Hoffmeyer. "Property managers were making purchases through individual Amazon Business accounts, resulting in nearly $80,000 in operational spending over 12 months."

Consolidating procurement across a growing number of sites

Keeping tabs on all this purchasing became increasingly difficult. So, Hoffmeyer and RangeWater's corporate accounting team set out to find a solution. Last June, Hoffmeyer began working with RangeWater's account executive at Amazon Business to implement the Amazon Business Associated Accounts Program (AAP).

The AAP program provided RangeWater with a consolidated view of procurement activities across its sites, along with aggregated reporting to track spending by category and item. "We were excited by the prospect of stopping the use of personal accounts for business purposes, gaining purchase visibility at a corporate level, and allowing sites to be invoiced for Amazon orders," Hoffmeyer explains.

"Such a sizable transition required close attention to detail and Amazon Business offered RangeWater exceptional support," Hoffmeyer says. "They explained the process clearly and provided lots of visual aids for sharing with our teams. They were always available to escalate invoicing approvals and got on the phone with site managers personally to troubleshoot specific account issues. We completed the onboarding in roughly 90 days which was right on schedule for what we would consider a successful roll out."

Benefits that continue to improve

The expanded smart business buying relationship between RangeWater and Amazon Business has delivered significant improvements in procurement efficiency in the following ways:

Enhanced visibility: RangeWater gained a clear view of spending patterns across its communities, enabling data-driven procurement decisions through the use of Amazon Business Analytics. Once onboarding was complete, Hoffmeyer says RangeWater's primary use of AAP's reporting has been to track and reduce delinquency among its various sites. "Having the visibility on which sites need extra help keeping their payables up to date is a huge benefit," she says. "It has reduced workload on our corporate accounting team and allowed us to centralize invoice processing as needed."

Cost optimization: Access to business-only pricing and bulk ordering has helped to deliver competitive and consistent pricing on a wide range of products, while discounts on Business Prime memberships further reduced costs. "We are early in the program to estimate overall savings on orders, but it is fair to say that we are seeing significant cost savings already in prime subscriptions due to the 50% off rate that was made available through the Associated Accounts Program." Hoffmeyer says.

Streamlined purchasing: As an AAP member, each RangeWater property gains access to a dedicated line of credit and customizable invoicing terms. This streamlined approach eliminates the need for credit card transactions, enhancing convenience while reducing administrative burdens.

Looking to the future, RangeWater's Amazon Business account executive, along with their category adoption manager, plan to hold strategic roundtables with the 10 top-spending RangeWater sites to gather feedback and drive even greater adoption across the entire portfolio while supporting specific RangeWater procurement initiatives.

"[AAP] is great for overseeing and simplifying the orders of a diverse portfolio of sites," Hoffmeyer says. "We are excited to continue to build the relationship."

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