Modificación de los hidrogeles y obtención de nanopartículas de oro.

There has been concern over the dearth of purchasing and outsourcing literature for activities within a service industry context. For example, Bryntse(1996), observed that most of the purchasing literature was based on a manufacturing industry context in which service purchasing does not fit well. In 2000, Van der Kooistra & Vosselman commented that up until then, most of the research into inter-firm relationships had centred on sectors like the automobile industry and consumer electronics (Van der Meer-Kooistra & Vosselman 2000)which are part of the manufacturing industry. Even with the little available research work on services outsourcing, most of the work has been in the area of information systems (IS) outsourcing. In fact, according to Burdon and Bhalla (2005) over the past decade, there has been proliferation in the number of studies looking into IT enabled outsourcing and little attention had been given to outsourcing of services in other sectors such as Engineering and Facilities Management which have also seen explosive growth.

There has been increased attention to service purchasing in the last decade and a growing number of firms are making the “do-versus-buy” decision in favour of buying services formerly accomplished in-house ( Fitzsimmons et al. 1998, Van der Meer-Kooistra & Vosselman 2000, Nordin 2006). But, it is generally emphasised that due to the features that characterise services, the service purchasing process is more complex and less standardised than purchasing of goods (Bryntse 1996, Fitzsimmons et al. 1998). Services have been described by many authors as less tangible, heterogeneous, perishable, and having simultaneous consumption and production (Lovelock & Yip 1996, Boyt & Harvey 1997). It is these very features that make decisions regarding service purchasing more complex than those involving goods. For example, the

intangibility of services makes specification of the service required less precise and evaluation of the vendor very difficult (Bryntse 1996, Fitzsimmons et al. 1998). Further still, service quality has many dimensions, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and tangibles (Parasuraman et al. 1985) most of which are not easy to measure and ascertain before purchasing. The difficulty in assessing capacity to deliver quality service before it is offered increases uncertainty (Lovelock & Yip 1996) in services purchasing compared to industrial purchasing of goods.

When it comes to services sourcing and evaluation, the challenge is not only with the difference between services and goods. While service businesses differ from goods based ones, the service industry itself is fragmented. And this fragmentation is characterised by several key characteristics that distinguish the nature of services offered (Lovelock & Yip 1996, Hussey & Jenster 2003). Authors in the service management field have proposed service typologies which they argue differentiate better between the management issues and concerns in different types of services (Silvesto et al. 1992). According to Boyt and Harvey (1997), classification systems can give new insights into each individual service type, thereby stressing the need for differentiated service strategies for individual market roles. This is also supported by Cook et al (1999) who argues that classification schemes are important because they allow for better understanding of the characteristics differentiating service organisations and give researchers a foundation for developing theories about the forces at work within specific organisations.

The utility of service classification schemes ultimately lies in their ability to facilitate the development of meaningful strategies and guidelines for service monitoring and operations (Cook et al. 1999). Therefore, whether someone is looking at service strategy locally or globally, it seems unwise to talk in broad brush terms about the service sector or service industries as though all organisations faced more or less the same strategic problems (Lovelock & Yip 1996).

Several dimensions have been used in the classification and discussion of service typologies, the common ones being production focus, people or their possessions, degree of labour intensity, length of customer contact or degree of interaction, extent of customisation, extent to which customer contact personnel exercise judgment in meeting individual needs, source of value added, front or back office (Lovelock & Yip 1996, Silvesto et al. 1992, Verma 2000). For example, Lovelock and Yip (1996) classified service processes into three categories based on whether the processes are primarily tangible or intangible and whether customers need to be physically present during service production. The three categories are; people processing services- involving tangible actions on customers in person, possession processing services- these involve tangible actions to physical objects to improve their value for the customer, and information based services- these involve, collecting, manipulating, interpreting, and transmitting data to create value (Lovelock & Yip 1996). Another classification is based on the physical

presence of the customer during service production, services could either be classified as „back office‟ or „front office‟ with people processing services being more of front office services compared to possession processing services and information based services (Lovelock & Yip 1996).

On a much broader level, services have been classified into consumer and business services. According to this classification, business services tend to be more technological in nature than consumer services because of the greater complexity of organisational needs (Fitzsimmons et al. 1998). This argument points to the fact that the differences in services would suggest different management strategies (Lovelock & Yip 1996) and more specifically different sourcing approaches (Fitzsimmons et al. 1998).

According to Hussey and Jester (2003), while it was once enough to provide a simple list of decision drivers for outsourced activities, it is no longer sensible to treat all outsourcing as the same because purchasers and suppliers face different issues for each type of outsourcing. It does not seem sensible to ignore this difference in research. But on the other hand, other researchers, despite the acknowledgment of the difference in service processes and their support for service type and industry tailored strategies, also warn against the mistake of examining services on an industry by industry basis (Lovelock & Yip 1996). Based on this argument, being able to strike a balance between the two extremes of over generalisation and over specification becomes the researcher‟s challenge. Since the present research focused on the maintenance service, the next section examines trends in industrial equipment maintenance.