The design and evaluation of manufacturing system design is the subject of this paper. Though much attention has been given to the design of manufacturing systems, in practice most efforts still remain empirically-based. Numerous idioms have been used in the attempt to describe the operation of manufacturing systems. When a company tries to become "lean" or wants to increase the production and become more efficient, the company will start to introduce numerous concepts developed by Toyota and others. The problem is that a company does not know the order in which to implement the lean changes or why they should implement what they are implementing. This approach greatly slows manufacturing improvements when complementary or contradictive concepts are introduced on an ad-hoc basis. In this paper, a sequence of implementation steps will be developed through the application of axiomatic design. This sequence will provide a design methodology for lean production which connects manufacturing system design objectives to operation design parameters. This paper will use the methodology developed to improve manufacturing processes in two different companies.