As procurement practices become more integrated into larger business strategies around social responsibility, companies are paying closer attention to their supplier base and actively seeking diversity—supporting minority- or women-owned businesses or suppliers that can help meet environmental, social, and governance and corporate social responsibility targets.

To that end, there is a growing push to identify local suppliers from within the communities in which organisations reside. Frequently, these initiatives are driven by regulatory guidelines (most often in the case of public sector entities), but there is a rising appreciation for the value of local buying beyond questions of compliance. For starters, it helps deepen the connection between a business and the community. But the benefits run deeper. “Local buying is good for small businesses and our third-party sellers, but it’s also good for our local communities,” says Antwuan Griffin, general manager, socially responsible purchasing, Amazon Business. “One of the things the pandemic taught us is the intrinsic value in strengthening our local supply chains and making sure our small-business communities are thriving, so they have sufficient capacity. It’s all part of a smarter approach to business buying.”

Happily, local buying is a space in which the value to the business and the values of a business can successfully align, says Lynn Meadors, senior customer advisor at Amazon Business. Investments in the local community can be deeply meaningful to those making them. “These are not random people who happen to be in the area. These are the communities in which buyers live, where their children go to school, where their parents live, and where they grew up,” she says.

Technology as an enabler

Historically, the biggest roadblock to robust local purchasing hasn’t been want or willingness; it was all about logistical capacity—endless hours searching to identify potential suppliers, place and pick up orders, and beyond. “It would cause operational headaches and bottlenecks,” Meadors says. “It was so inefficient.”

Griffin agrees. “The biggest challenge is getting actionable intelligence,” he says. People are willing, even eager, to make procurement decisions that prioritise local businesses, provided they’re given the means to do it. Leveraging technology is key to that effort. Companies can use the feature set of Amazon Business, for example, to identify, highlight, and prioritise local sellers, setting parameters around pricing thresholds, product offerings, and delivery requirements.

“We see smart business buying really being leveraged by customers of all sizes and stripes. For small and medium-sized businesses, this may be the first time they’ve had an ability to drive purchasing toward other local businesses.” — Antwuan Griffin, General Manager, Socially Responsible Purchasing, Amazon Business

“It makes it easy for the administrator to set up a preferred buying policy, and buying local is just one of the many smart business buying policies we use,” Griffin says. “Products that fall into relevant categories that have been established as a priority show up first, so it’s incredibly simple for users of Amazon Business to find something that aligns with what it is they’re supposed to be buying.”

These tools also allow procurement teams to integrate local buying into other strategic considerations around purchasing, while robust real-time reporting and analytics provide the visibility required to properly measure success. “The capabilities of Amazon Business help leaders track progress with an eye toward goals, from the user or buyer level up through spending groups and to the organization as a whole,” he says.

The ability to identify, onboard, and highlight through Amazon Business also allows organisations with smaller procurement operations lacking technical capacity or human bandwidth to take more proactive steps around local purchasing. This, Griffin says, can be a game-changer. “We see smart business buying really being leveraged by customers of all sizes and stripes,” he says. “For small and medium-sized businesses, this may be the first time they’ve had an ability to drive purchasing toward other local businesses. Historically, you’ve needed to set up an entire division within your procurement or finance shop to drive these types of outcomes. Now organizations of all sizes can think big, and dream of what’s possible through procurement.”

The power of local buying in action

For Meadors, the potential of local buying isn’t something that’s just for customers of Amazon Business. At the National Institute of Governmental Purchasing’s 2023 convention in Louisville, Kentucky, she hoped to use the presence of Amazon Business at the event to do some tangible good. Having previously lived in the Louisville area, Meadors was familiar with the landscape of nonprofit organizations there, and identified one dedicated to youth in foster care that was in need of donations.

The idea was to create toiletry kits that could be distributed to the young people served by the nonprofit. Rather than simply order what was needed, Meadors utilized the tools of Amazon Business to refine her search. “I used our Guided Buying and local buying features, setting up preferences for Kentucky suppliers so each of the products we were searching for came from a seller in that region,” she says. “Then I placed the order.”

It was a simple process, Meadors notes, but identical to what any other Amazon Business customer could utilise in an effort to drive local purchasing and generate the force multiplier it can represent. More than 300 kits were created and distributed—well beyond what they’d hoped to generate—but Meadors particularly appreciated how they were able to expand the project’s reach.

“We found a local seller, so they got the business benefit. Local facilities processed it, so we have that layer, and we were giving to a local organisation,” she says. “It’s the idea of making multiple impacts, layered on top of each other.”

Originally published on the Wall Street Journal.