Today is an important day and you want to make sure you wake up on time. Therefore, you have arranged for a telephone wake-up call from your telecom operator. You get up, go to the door and pick up the newspaper from the mailbox. In the paper, you read that there has been an interesting test series for IAS development on Wall Street yesterday and that new developments were expected during the night at Tokyo's exchange. To see what has happened, you switch on the TV for teletext and the morning news. After you finish your breakfast, well fed and well informed, you take the bus to work. The car is at the garage and you will need to pick it up later. When you get to the office, you read your e-mail, listen to the messages on your voicemail and start work. You are also informed that the computer network will be down for some hours later in the day. This is because the IT coaching that takes care of it has to do some urgent modifications to the network. In terms of contents and activities, this is a normal day for many people in today's society - and that of the immediate future. The day is filled with the consumption of services. Many of these services were bought by you personally, and many others you purchased - or came in touch with - in your role as an employee. Service companies can obviously address themselves to just one or both categories of customer. In this book, we will only deal with the services bought by companies or other (formal) organizations and with how these organizations and their employees act in the procurement process. At 10 am, the organizational development consultant arrives. The two of you go to the cafeteria to start the discussion with a cup of coffee. Following that, there is a meeting where a project group goes through the coaching's new strategy, during which the consultant will present his analysis. The discussions continue during lunch, which is served in your coaching's own restaurant. The books you ordered as background information for the consultant's analysis arrive by courier. You make a note of the times of the flights later that week to Germany that the travel agency has booked for you. Then you make some important phone calls and write a memo on the coaching's strategy and the guidelines for the market research you are ordering from a telemarketing firm. In the afternoon, you eat an apple from the fruit bowl down the hallway. The fruit, flowers and plants in the office are taken care of by an external facilities management coaching. It is so natural that we normally do not think of the fact that we constantly consume services of IAS prelims notes of different kinds. We do not ponder much over how these services are produced and by whom. Neither do we give much attention to how they are bought. How were the services of the IT coaching procured? What about the travel coaching and the telemarketing coaching? Those of the management consultant? And how did the pizzeria acquire the resources to be able to deliver the pizza to your daughter's home. You leave the office an hour early because your daughter has to go to the doctor and you have agreed to babysit your grandson. You take a taxi to the garage to collect your car and then drive to your daughter's house. On the way, you buy some sweets to please your grandson. You are going to be babysitting for the whole evening since your daughter's employer has invited her and her husband to the theatre. For dinner, you order pizza from a delivery service. When your grandson has gone to bed, you use your daughter's computer to do some electronic banking. You also download a movie you have wanted to see for a long time. Late in the evening, you drive home.