Lean Manufacturing

When I went to Japan recently, I read a book about Toyota and the way it runs its factories. They are quite unique even amongst Japanese companies but one of the things that struck me the most was the lean manufacturing and something called a value flow diagram.
The basic idea was that in manufacturing as in many other types of industry, a product is produced but it does not spend all of its time having value added to it, value meaning something that is required to turn the raw material into what the customer wants. It could be that something unecessary is being done like printing a pretty picture on the side that the customer might not care about or it might be something related to the manufacturing process like sitting on a shelf for 2 weeks before being used in the factory. You can spend loads of money hiring people and they can analyse these things and tell you where to slicken the system to something that is close to adding value 100% of the time by removing waste.
I then though of a good example as I was returning home on the plane. The airport - one of the worst examples of non-lean flow. You turn up to the airport in a car, train or plane etc. The only value then added to your journey is checking in, putting your luggage onto the plane and then boarding and flying. In between however, you have to usually walk a long way to the check-in desk, a long way through security, wait a long time to board and then taxi for several minutes to the runway, all adding about 3 hours to the start and perhaps an hour to the end of many long-haul flights. One of the improvements made is to check-in online but the layout of airports is still not great. Why you have to check-in 2 hours before departure is beyond me, baggage systems should be faster and should not have to go via electric cars across the tarmac, people should be able to only walk a short distance from car/train/bus to the check-in desk, security is arguably far too intense and slow and distances between departure lounges and gates are too long, boarding is too slow - they should use all doors on the plane, not just the front one, lugage should be loaded directly into the plane from the baggage system and then the distance between the gates and the runways should be 1/2 a mile max.
So all we need to do is knock Heathrow down and build it again!!!