I have no direct experience, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think this type of thing only really tends to pop up in large multinationals that literally just end up with too many moving parts at certain points to be able to keep every gear spinning at once. The business process dependency tree is just plain old _too complex_ to get 100% utilization of every piece at every point in time. It's more profitable for the business at that scale to have a certain role just "idle" for a period of time rather than fundamentally change business processes to maximize individual resource utilization.
