There's a valuable point made in that article, that in a lot of business reliability is more important than speed. That is, if you do something exactly as your customer expects, every time, that's better than being occasionally the fastest but unreliably so.

It's known as Lean Manufacturing. People bang on about how that's about reducing costs & wastes etc. but really the heart of lean is synchronised production to smooth out demand variation.

This made a lot more sense in 2013. Now we're about to run out of crude oil storage in the USA. There's an incredible price war going on with oil right now.

I'd like to see a chart that shows the percentage of operating cost between fuel and crew salaries given oil prices. I wonder if labor is the more expensive component now and fast steaming is cheaper.

It is curious that this hasn't resulted in pricing differentiation, where you pay more for quicker delivery, or more reliable delivery. Or maybe that exists but the weights (penalties for lateness vs premium for reduced transit) are variable, and the resulting correction signal to hard to optimise for with a high lag system such as a supply chain. A classic OR and non-linear control problem.