The idea of the decoupling inventories is to decouple or disengage different parts of the production systems. As we can observe easily different machines equipment and people normally work at different rates some slower and some faster. A machine for example might be producing half the output of the machine on which the item being handled is to be processed the next. Inventories in between the various machines are held in order to disengage the processing on those machines. In the absence of such inventories different machines and people cannot work simultaneously on a continuous basis. When such inventories are held then even if a machine breaks down the work on others would not stop