Introducing Punch-in: Amazon Business and Fraxion integrate to further simplify business purchasing

We’re pleased to announce the latest Fraxion collaboration with Amazon Business: integration with Amazon Business Punch-in. In addition to our current Punchout procurement feature, we now offer the latest Amazon Business Punch-in integration. Launched by Amazon Business in 2022, this new procurement tool enables businesses to simplify the buying experience.

Speaking of the latest Fraxion and Amazon Business integration, Fraxion CEO, Stanton Jandrell said: “As innovators in purchasing efficiency, we’re excited to offer our valued customers the latest in seamless, simplified purchasing experiences, underpinned by proactive spend controls. This emerging eCommerce technology partnership ties in with our commitment to enhancing navigation, user experience, user adoption, and providing multiple entry points into Fraxion.”

In this article, we’ll compare the Punch-in and Punchout processes, define the business benefits and provide insights into how you can empower an accountable spending culture by connecting Amazon Business and Fraxion for business purchasing.

What is Fraxion?

Fraxion is a cloud procurement solution that offers a full suite of features that enable efficient eProcurement and effective spend management. The intuitive platform enables all users to purchase easily and accountably, while managers are empowered to view real-time budgets at decision points to make informed spending decisions prior to approving requests. All workflows are automated and notify users when action is required and flag potential risks in transactions via in-app alerts. Engineered for finance teams to effectively manage procurement processes company-wide, all transactions are auditable, and an embedded analytics and reporting tool provides actionable insights into spending by employee, supplier, budget, and transaction to identify saving opportunities and make better informed spending decisions.

What is Amazon Business Punch-in?

Punch-in is an easily configurable integration between your Amazon Business account and a procurement system, in this instance, Fraxion. It enables registered Fraxion users to purchase directly on the Amazon Business store and comply with procurement policies configured in Fraxion. This seamless integration provides a simplified and familiar buying experience, while providing spend visibility and control throughout the purchasing process.

What are the differences between Punchout and Punch-in?

Punchout and Punch-in are both ways in which Amazon Business customers can easily shop Amazon Business’ catalog of products. The key difference is Punch-in allows you to begin to your business purchase on the Amazon Business website before submitting your completed cart to your eProcurement system, while the Punchout purchase process requires you to start the process in your eProcurement system.

Fraxion and Amazon Business integrated in 2020 to bring Punchout procurement to our mutual customers. For users, this process begins by creating a purchase request in Fraxion, clicking on the Punchout button, and gaining access to Amazon Business. There they access hundreds of millions of products and enjoy the familiar Amazon shopping experience to browse catalogs and add items to a shopping cart. After clicking submit, the initial purchase request lists the shopping cart items and initiates the approval process in Fraxion.
Once approved and budget compliant, a purchase order is generated, sent to Amazon Business where their world-class fulfillment process begins.

Here’s how Punch-in works

With Punch-in, the journey begins in Amazon Business. Users browse catalogs and enjoy a personalized shopping experience they're familiar with, browsing, reading product reviews, and adding items to their cart. Once shopping is complete, they can simply select Fraxion from the configured Punch-in group, update the shipping and payment options, review the order, and hit submit. 

●    Amazon Business redirects users to Fraxion, and instantly updates the purchase request with the selected shopping cart items and the request is ready to submit for approval. It’s easy, familiar, and significantly reduces purchasing cycle times. 
●    Once redirected, Fraxion initiates the spend management process, ensuring that users comply with configured internal policies. 
●    The request is routed for approval, where it’s subject to delegation of authority structures and budget checks in Fraxion. 
●    Once approved, an electronic purchase order is submitted to Amazon Business for acceptance. 
●    Once received, the order is processed according to the payment method configured on your Amazon Business account.

Amazon Business Punch-in provides users with easy, familiar shopping experiences, while Fraxion’s automated purchasing and approval workflow ensures that all spending is tracked, approved, and on budget.

What are the benefits of using Amazon Business Punch-in with Fraxion?

“Our collaboration delivers on outcomes that are intrinsic to both brands' values; innovating to give customers easy to use and intuitive experiences that simplify purchasing processes,” said Stanton Jandrell of the new Punch-in integration. 

A personalized shopping experience

Since users are connected to their organization’s Amazon Business account, they benefit from fast and relevant search results, they can see previously viewed and purchased products and quantities. 

Simplicity and user adoption

Using Amazon Business enables a familiar personal online shopping experience for business purposes. Users will already be accustomed to this buying experience, making it that much easier to gain adoption and roll out the process company-wide with minimal training requirements. 

Empowering users to equip their departments and teams with what they need to operate effectively has never been easier. Fraxion enables accountable decentralized purchasing, while finance teams maintain centralized visibility and internal control.

Purchasing that’s compliant 

Ensuring that your Amazon Business purchases are subject to internal procurement policies and budget checks in Fraxion eliminates uncontrolled purchasing and overspending. All employees are accountable for their spending decisions and managers can view purchase requests against real-time budgets and approve with confidence. Your company’s purchasing policy guidelines are adhered to, while your staff have the latitude to spend responsibly. 

Spend control

Unauthorized or rogue spending with uncontracted vendors often results in hefty bills that lead to time consuming corrective action. 

When purchasing via Punch-in, requests follow your organization’s policies and rules, configured in Fraxion. There's no need to browse multiple vendor sites and compare prices. On Amazon Business, users gain access to millions of products in one location and can take advantage of business-only pricing and volume discounts. There’s a clear requisition and approval process in Fraxion, and a full audit trail of every transaction lifecycle. Accounts payable processes are simplified as all documents are digitally recorded in Fraxion, and receiving, matching, and reporting processes are simplified.  

Achieving compliant business purchasing and sustainable savings is a cinch with Fraxion’s internal control framework that promotes accountable spending behavior.

Greater visibility

Current and historic spend with Amazon Business can be pulled directly from the Amazon Business Spend Analytics tool to help you obtain instant insights into your spend with data visualizations. 

In addition, Fraxion’s analytics and reporting tool, Insights gives you the power to generate reports on demand and visualize spending data to identify saving opportunities. Spend oversight can be leveraged at decision points, by authorizing managers to review budget impact before approving purchases. This real-time insight informs and empowers responsible decision-making.

Accounts payable teams can easily report on and consolidate open purchase orders to achieve even more savings. This holistic approach to spend management enables our customers to maximize every dollar they spend, reduce waste, and make informed and accountable decisions at each stage in the purchasing cycle. 

Simplify business purchasing 

We’re proud to integrate with Amazon Business to drive simplicity, efficiencies, and best procurement practices. 

“Our customer-centric synergy has resulted in another innovative solution that’s making day-to-day purchasing processes easier for our mutual customers,” said Jandrell.

To find out more about how you can achieve business purchasing efficiency without losing financial control, book a Fraxion demo today and see the Amazon Business Punch-in integration in action. 

Watch the Punch-in and Punchout explainer video below: