[pedrosbmartins]

It depends on what you mean by function. I did an internship at Coca-Cola in Brazil a decade ago. They had ~500 employees country-wide, mainly marketing and operation strategy folks. The production of the actual beverages and other products was in great part delegated to partner bottlers. My boss there used to joke that if all the 500 employees were fired at once, the amount of Coca-Cola cans and bottles sold wouldn't drop at all for months. And I do believe he was right. In the long-run, of course, things would be different - that's where marketing and strategy pays off.