Wendy van der Valk

An application‐based classification to understand buyer‐supplier interaction in business services

Purpose – Most existing classifications of business services have taken the perspective of the supplier as opposed to that of the buyer. To address this imbalance, the purpose of this paper is to propose a classification of business services based on how the buying company applies the service with respect to its own business processes.Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers some specific aspects of the process of buying and exchanging business services, focusing on the everyday production and consumption of services as opposed to the initial purchasing and negotiation phases.Findings – Earlier literature has developed similar, albeit less elaborate classifications, but does not provide detailed insight into how such classifications are related to differentiated buyer‐supplier interaction. This classification distinguishes between four business service applications; as a component, semi‐manufacture, instrument or consumable. For each of these four types of services, interaction has to achieve dif...

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...

Effective buyer‐supplier interaction patterns in ongoing service exchange

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop theory on effective buyer‐seller interaction for different types of business services. A classification of business services which identifies four service types based on how they are used by the buying company is used.Design/methodology/approach – Propositions based on earlier work in this area and validate these empirically by studying interaction in nine ongoing service exchanges at two different buying companies are developed.Findings – For the three service types that could be identified in the case companies, the extent to which companies display a pattern of interaction that is in line with the proposed pattern has a positive effect on service exchange success has been largely found. Some aspects of the proposed patterns, however, seem less critical for success than others, leading to minor revisions in the effective patterns of interaction.Research limitations/implications – The main limitation of this study is that only the interaction patterns for...

Variety in business-to-business services and buyer-supplier interaction: The case of cleaning services

Purpose – The paper aims to empirically validate a recently developed typology to demonstrate that services that are similar in terms of technical content, but different with regard to how they are used by the buying company, require different buyer-supplier interaction processes. Design/methodology/approach – The paper conducts an embedded case study based on dyadic data collection to investigate the purchase of cleaning services by Netherlands Railways (NS) from two suppliers. These services differ with regard to how they are used by NS: as part of the value-proposition to customers (train and station cleaning) or as part of the support processes for NS (office cleaning). Findings – The paper finds that for a technically homogenous service, fundamental differences in required interaction arise as a result of different usage situations. These differences are reflected in the sourcing decision and the design of the service delivery management process. Research limitations/implications – Besides the genera...