In Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos and Complexity, Jamshid Gharajedaghi describes the key requirements for improving the throughput of a system:

... even a simple throughput consists of a chain of events and activities that need to be integrated. Since these activities are usually carried out by different groups in different departments of an organization, strong interface and effective coupling among them are a must for a competitive throughput. Actually, to design a throughput system, we need to:

• Know the state of the art, as well as the availability and feasibility of alternative technologies and their relevance to the emerging competitive game.
• Understand the flow, the interface between active elements, and how the coupling function works
• Appreciate the dynamics of the system - the time cycle, buffers, delays, queues, bottlenecks, and feedback loops
• Handle the interdependencies among critical variables, plus deal with open and closed loops, structural imperatives, and system constraints.
• Have an operational knowledge of throughput accounting, target costing, and variable budgeting.

Gharajedaghi uses the term 'competitive' to stress that changes must compete to win the hearts and minds of the stakeholders, over the 'as-is' situation, if those changes are to be realized and deliver the results that are desired. So I'd add four things to his list:

• creating an integrated plan which manages the change process itself (including its risks). The desired behaviors, achievable subsystem maturity, and coupling coherence of the resulting system must be realistically assessed, logically sequenced as blockpoint releases, and implemented incrementally through investments in capabilities and associated changes to components, and all of thus must be prioritized and rationalized with robust but agile planning.
• emphasizing protocols over processes, with particular focus on identification and monitoring of key measures and success factors, and the decisions which they must support
• evangelising the need for and nature of the changes so the ideas stick, i.e. are adopted and committed to by all stakeholders
• leaning out the system, so that desired efficiencies are achieved, with particular focus on the system's administrative functions.