Chris Matts posted today on Lean IT Processes.  It is about applying lean manufacturing principles to IT processes.  The post is good, except for implication 7.  Implication #7 is "do not preassemble parts."

"This creates inventory of part assembled parts. These parts may need to be de-assembled into constituent parts to be used to assemble a separate product."

The problem with the implication is it diverges from actual supply chain best practices.  In the production of any given product, there is a point at which there is "no going back."  This is the point at which further modifications make the product specific to something.  This is called the coupling point.  It is true that you do not want to preassemble the final product past the coupling point.  However, you do want to preassemble the product up to the coupling point and preassemble (as much as possible) the subassemblies after the coupling point.  The goal in manufacturing is to make the coupling point occur as late as possible in the process.

In my opinion, the real implication is to do as much preassembly as possible while delaying making the software specific to the user as long as possible.  This introduces the notion of a coupling point for software, and agile development attempts (though it does state this explicitly) to delay the point until the customer needs it.  This creates the demand "pull" from the customer, as opposed to the traditional "push" from the development team.