F.A. Rozemeijer

Buying business services: towards a structured service purchasing process

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.Rese...

How to manage corporate purchasing synergy in a decentralised company? Towards design rules for managing and organising purchasing synergy in decentralised companies

Abstract More and more organisations are showing interest in how purchasing strategy and structures may support their overall business strategies. More and more, therefore, the question prevails how to get organised at a corporate level to capture the potential purchasing synergies. The challenge is to generate knowledge regarding how to structure and manage effectively purchasing synergies between business units. This paper deals with the concept of purchasing synergy or more specifically: the management of value-adding linkages in the area of purchasing between different business units in a multi-business company. It summarises the intermediate results from Ph.D. research currently conducted at Eindhoven University of Technology. Based on the findings derived from in-depth case studies at three large multinational companies, we propose a model, which may support management by formulating the right strategy and designing the right structure aimed at capturing the potential synergies.

Revolution in purchasing: building competitive power through proactive purchasing

New concepts in the field of purchasing, such as outsourcing, supply-base management and value-chain management, have become increasingly common practice. Because of the crossfunctional character of these concepts, the call for a strategic reorientation of the purchasing function becomes louder. However, a clear future vision to guide the purchasing process has not yet matured. We investigated the most prominent developments and the expected trends in the profession, as well as the role and position that purchasing is probably going to have in major companies ten years from now. This article will start with a description of the changing business context with which companies are currently confronted. This is followed by an overview of the purchasing and supply practices of leading-edge companies. We conclude with a model for future purchasing organizations to make simultaneous improvements both in increasing functional expertise and in horizontal synergy. Copyright

Getting Organised for Purchasing and Supply Management in the Information Age

Purchasing structures in large companies nowadays are a lot different from what they were in the Eighties. And they will, beyond doubt, be different from today in the future. Two decades ago concepts like purchasing portfolio management, total cost of ownership, supplier partnership, early supplier involvement and cross functional buying teams were not known. Since then many new strategic and organizational concepts in the field of purchasing and supply (chain) management have been developed. The professional development of the purchasing and supply function in organizations can be analyzed from both an internal and an external point of view. Firstly, the internal role of purchasing changed from a mere operational into a truly strategic role. From just handling orders, negotiating and contracting, purchasing in many organizations now focuses on initial purchasing aimed at developing orderroutines and support systems enabling users to order directly from suppliers, with whom systems contracts have been closed. Secondly, the interface between purchasing and its suppliers changed. From “competitive bidding” and mere tendering, companies have tried to become more differentiated in their supplier strategies. This is reflected by attempts to apply supplier (portfolio) management, to integrate suppliers into product development and to go beyond the first tier of suppliers looking for opportunities to capture further cost benefits (supply chain optimization).