
Is Slow Steaming Good for the Supply Chain? (2013) - rfreytag
http://www.inboundlogistics.com/cms/article/is-slow-steaming-good-for-the-supply-chain/
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Naritai
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.

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SixSigma
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.

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PhantomGremlin
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.

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mapmap
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.

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angry_octet
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.

