The Processes of a Firm

Over the last decade, changes in a firm’s different environmental spheres have led to a massively increasing significance of process structures and also how processes are designed, compared to the organisational structure, i.e. how firms are structured into organisational units (Osterloh and Frost, 1998). Growing demands from customers, the deregulation and globalisation of many markets, the increasing role of the capital market, but above all, the rapid development of information and communication technologies have generated a fundamental intensification of competition. This has caused the time factor to become a competitively decisive criterion alongside quality and price. Competition, in general, is now characterised far more as a time-based competition than before (Stalk and Hout, 1990, 1992). We can observe that smaller fishes are not always ‘swallowed up’ by bigger fishes, but also that slower fishes are swallowed up by quicker ones.