Each person on an assembly line operates independent of the rest, there’s no “coordination” as such. A person picks up an incoming object, transforms it and sets it down. For that person, for all practical purposes, the rest of the people working on conveyor belt don’t even exist. I suppose that (not having to coordinate) played a key role in the popularity of conveyor systems. It’s simple enough to debug, address bottlenecks etc.

The closest s/w equivalent I could think of is Unix pipes. When I do “cat foo.csv | sort | uniq -c”, cat/sort/unique aren’t coordinating with each other, each takes the content from stdin, transforms and place it in stdout.