One of the things that I have noticed as I look out at the world is – things change.
The weather changes, the tides change, and customer demand changes.
Of these three, variation in customer demand is perhaps of the most interest to lean practitioners, because, after all, if customer demand were constant, the challenge of designing and managing the value stream would be much simpler.
So accepting that in most cases customer demand does change, a sensible follow up questions are: By how much? And is the demand at least stable?