A similar thing occurs in any manufacturing or service operation. Make one particular department extra efficient and it can actually bury other departments in excess inventory and paperwork and slow them down, making a mess of things. So there is a need to coordinate activities. When you set up one-piece flow in a cell, how do you know how fast the cell should be designed to go? What should the capacity of the equipment be? How many people do you need? The answer is the takt time.
