Yaniv Dinur presented some of the challenges experienced in work with a large engineering-to-order company, "FL Smidth: Engineering to Order – engineering, procurement, and production in one flow." The client was having major challenges synchronizing the design, ordering and final assembly, particularly in association with the long-lead items with customer orders. (This is something I have seen as well.) They implemented principles of flow and buffer management (Kanban, DBR, ...) to help significantly improve their due date performance and open up the possibility to work differently with their suppliers and potentially gain more sales. Yaniv needed at least 30 minutes more to describe how the elements of the solution work together.
His biggest realization or surprise was that since local measures are found everywhere, these local measures also get baked into the local ERP systems. The ERP system is built to reinforce the rules under which it was created. And this can divorce the local operations from the purpose behind their work - causing local priorities to be misaligned with the global priorities.