Small or startup companies typically have one person with each set of skills - either on staff or contracted in: marketing, sales, accounting, legal, operations, finance and whatever the business actually does, like engineering or carpentry or mechanics. These functions are performed by one person each, often a founder or owner in multiple roles. Each may have a CxO (CEO, COO, CFO) title from day one, and keep it as they hire an assistant, then several, then as they train a successor. Large companies inherit this functional management model - departments answer and report to each other as if they were single persons in that role.

However, that model often fails at large scales and reliably fails under five pressures that any modern business faces: accountability, transparency, sustainability, globalization and outsourcing. The last is the easiest to understand: a company can hire fulltime staff or it can contract a part-time expert or external service to perform law, accounting, advertising or other duties in which it has no real strategic need to innovate and no expertise supervising. But hiring and firing individuals is far easier than figuring out all the dependencies on a big department and all the consequences of, for instance, hiring someone in Poland to do its job. Outsourcing doesn't become an option until a business process is well enough understood to write a clear contract with an outside organization spelling out performance criteria and remedies at least for common problems. But most companies need deeper documentation anyway.

Business process management (BPM) looks at every activity, inside and outside the company, as transactions, handoffs, tests and services. The form of products and deliverables is far less important than how useful they are to the part of the organization that uses them, ultimately to serve the customer. One might deliver a written report one day, a voice report the next, and the person behind it to the customer's premises the next day, depending on the real need.

In good BPM methods, a "value chain" describes every stage including the sourcing of inputs and acceptance tests for them, through production and marketing and design, to sales and the ultimate delivery of services to the customer - whether in the form of physical products or not. Car companies, for instance, began in the 1980s to offer longer and longer warranties including more and more maintenance. They redefined their business from selling

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