Buying business services: towards a structured service purchasing process

Wendy van der Valk · Frank A. Rozemeijer

132 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Services Marketing

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Quality and Supply Management Customer Service Quality and Loyalty Outsourcing and Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to uncover the specific difficulties associated with buying services and proposes a structured purchasing process which can help organisational buyers to overcome the problems associated with services purchasing. Design/methodology/approach The authors investigate the supposed differences between goods and services procurement by means of literature research and a questionnaire distributed among Dutch purchasing managers. Additionally, they draw on experiences from additional case study research and business practice to better understand the results of the survey and to further explore the actual process of buying services. Findings The results of the literature review and the survey show that developing a proper specification is an important prerequisite for purchasing services successfully. Based on these findings, an expansion to the traditional purchasing process is proposed which incorporates the steps of pre‐selecting suppliers and detailing the initial specification. Research limitations/implications The survey is limited to The Netherlands. Furthermore, the questions in the survey consider the respondent's perception and not the “truth”. Practical implications For organisational buyers, the importance of a proper specification implies that they should involve service providers early on in the service purchasing process. The service providers consequently can exercise the appropriate resources to develop a high quality solution, but need to be able to demonstrate this added value in these early phases of the services purchasing process. Originality/value The paper adds to the discussion on buying services and tries to find out why this is perceived as complicated. It highlights three problem areas and proposes a solution to tackle these.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 132 citations exist upstream.

References

2003Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing 1995Developing relationships in business networks 2000Service Management and Marketing: A Customer Relationship Management Approach 1983Classifying Services to Gain Strategic Marketing Insights 1982International Marketing and Purchasing of Industrial Goods: An Interaction Approach 2004The Four Service Marketing Myths 2004Understanding and Managing the Services Supply Chain 2009Purchasing and Supply Chain Management: Analysis, Strategy, Planning and Practice

Cited by

2011Monitoring in service triads consisting of buyers, subcontractors and end customers 2013Effects of supply chain position on the motivation and practices of firms going green 2020Supplier selection using SWARA and WASPAS – a case study of Indian cement industry 2013A providers’ perspective on supplier relationships in performance-based contracting 2020Unraveling the Dimensions of Supplier Involvement and their Effects on NPD Performance: A Meta‐Analysis

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.