In Jaws, when they see the shark, Brody turns to Quint and says “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

Some manufacturers think like that. “We’re gonna need a bigger plant.” As in higher speed, capable of churning out great gouts of product. If you have the luxury of relatively few products on a well defined schedule, the high speed line may be the way to go. Few plants have this luxury. Many are not even certain what they are going to be running next week, much less next year. It’s Friday but that doesn’t mean Walmart won’t give you an order expecting for Tuesday delivery. Turning that high speed line around will be painful, if you can do it at all.

High speed lines are like big boats. They are incredibly efficient at getting large quantities of good from one port to another. They are useless for delivering a few cases of potato chips to the C-Store.

Most everyone today is in the low volume-high variability business. You too, probably. To meet that demand, you need to be able to turn on a nickel. (A dime’s too slow). Rather than a single high speed line, efficient as it might be, you may be better off with 2 or even 3 slower lines.

Cost – Capital cost doesn’t double with speed. It triples or even quadruples.

Lead times – Delivery lead times are generally a correlated with speed. You can usually get two slower lines faster than a single high speed line. You’re already out of time.

Complexity – Complexity correlates with speed meaning a more highly skilled workforce. Can you find those people?

Flexibility – Multiple lines mean that you can be running multiple products at any given time. Multiple lines mean that that any or all of them can be easily turned to make the product you need right now.

If you are Maersk, you can efficiently use a ship that carries 20,000 containers between 2 ports. Most of you need to get small amounts of product into many different hands.

You’re gonna need a bunch of smaller boats.