Procurement is a critical lever for agility, cost control, and innovation in the automotive industry and extends far beyond back-office functions. However, for large automakers, the procurement of cloud-based software and services often challenges this agility, creating opportunities for process improvement.
With global teams, complex compliance requirements, and a growing number of digital initiatives—from connected vehicles to smart factories—automotive organizations need a better way to help them manage software procurement at scale. Through AWS Private Marketplace, customers can implement an enterprise-wide procurement capability. In this post, we cover specific challenges automotive industries face, how customers can use Private Marketplace to help address these challenges while helping teams to access the tools they need, and provide steps to help customers best use Private Marketplace for their automotive procurement needs.
The challenges of traditional procurement
Automotive enterprises face issues with software procurement that involve time-consuming manual processes, such as requesting quotes, negotiating terms, and managing licenses. These processes are prone to errors, lack transparency, and result in delays, hindering productivity and increasing costs. Ensuring compliance with industry regulations and security standards is also challenging when dealing with multiple vendors and products.
Sequential security, legal, and compliance reviews result in lengthy approval cycles, extending project timelines through multiple approval stages. This impacts the amount of time it takes to deploy critical software. Engineering, IT, research and development (R&D), and business teams purchase software independently from one another, which makes purchasing processes becomes fragmented, leading to duplication and inconsistency. Enterprises lack centralized visibility and control over their procurement processes. This prevents procurement teams from effectively monitoring spending and standardizing contracts across departments and regions. As a result, organizations face decreased cost efficiency and increased financial and compliance risks. Unapproved software poses direct compliance risks to organizations. These risks include violations of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ISO 26262 functional safety protocols, and established cybersecurity standards. Organizations must ensure proper software approval processes to maintain regulatory compliance and protect sensitive data.
Private Marketplace: Redefining automotive procurement strategies
Automotive companies today need to balance innovation speed with industry compliance and security requirements. Solutions in Private Marketplace can help address this challenge.
Automotive companies starting their digital transformation need software that meets industry standards. AWS Marketplace provides solutions that has undergone evaluation. Private Marketplace takes a subset of those products and provides them to an organization. These solutions can help customers address data privacy requirements and regional regulations as part of their compliance efforts, thus creating a structured development environment that reduces deployment time by eliminating approval bottlenecks and standardizing workflows.
Private Marketplace helps automotive companies streamline their software procurement process. Teams can access approved automotive development tools through a centralized catalog while maintaining consolidated billing and budget management across projects. This helps organizations to focus more resources on development instead of administrative tasks.
You can find third-party automotive DevOps tools for software development, testing, and validation in Private Marketplace. It includes solutions for supplier collaboration and supply chain management so stakeholders can achieve specific, measurable outcomes.
Private Marketplace enables automotive companies to access per-approved simulation, testing, and development platforms. It provides connected vehicle solutions with Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing capabilities. Companies can also access machine learning (ML) platforms that customers can use for applications such as autonomous driving, maintenance prediction, and quality inspection.
Private Marketplace is more than a procurement tool. It helps automotive companies maintain agility and compliance while developing innovative solutions. Organizations can build on existing capabilities while exploring new possibilities. The service helps automotive companies focus on creating vehicles and transportation solutions for the future.
Get started with Private Marketplace
For best results, we recommend following these five steps when you get started using Private Marketplace:
1. Define governance requirements and policies – Define clear governance policies and guidelines for Private Marketplace. This refers to the rules and controls that administrators set to manage which software, and services users can access and purchase within their organization’s custom AWS Marketplace catalog. These policies ensure that only approved products, meeting specific security, compliance, and procurement standards, are available for subscription.
2. Configure catalogs and product categories – Work with teams to configure catalogs and product categories in Private Marketplace. This involves organizing products, services, and pricing information in a structured manner to help buyers search and compare offerings.
3. Onboard organizational units – Identify and onboard relevant organizational units in Private Marketplace. Provide personnel with access credentials, training, and documentation on how to use the platform.
4. Train internal teams to promote adoption and collaboration – Provide comprehensive training to internal stakeholders, including procurement professionals, category managers, and other relevant personnel. Ensure they understand how to navigate Private Marketplace, create and manage requests, and use the platform’s features.
5. Monitor and optimize – Monitor and optimize Private Marketplace to measure its impact on your procurement processes. Track usage, control costs, and maintain compliance to drive cost savings and operational efficiencies.
Managing private offers
Private offers are a purchasing program that allow sellers and buyers to negotiate custom prices and end user licensing agreement (EULA) terms for purchases in AWS Marketplace
The process of managing private offers follows these steps:
1. Procurement team identifies software requirements and begins negotiations with sellers in AWS Marketplace for pricing and terms.
2. Seller creates a customized private offer that includes the negotiated terms, pricing, payment schedules, and contract duration.
3. Seller extends the private offer to both your AWS account and the Private Marketplace administrator account to achieve proper access and management.
4. Private Marketplace administrator adds the product to your Private Marketplace catalog before accepting the private offer.
Automotive industry use case: In-vehicle infotainment system development
In-vehicle infotainment systems are an important component of the software-defined vehicle experience, providing drivers and passengers with a range of entertainment, navigation, and connectivity features. The development of these systems requires specialized software tools for user interface design, multimedia integration, and connectivity management.
Conclusion
In this post, we explored how companies can use Private Marketplace to streamline their procurement processes, improve governance and compliance, foster collaboration, and optimize costs. Private Marketplace enables organizations to access essential software products and services while focusing on core operations. This streamlined approach drives innovation and strengthened competitive advantage in the automotive industry.
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