There is a common myth taught in business schools: that there were three competing factors in business – speed, price, and quality. “You can have any two of them,” professors will say, “But you can’t have all three.” The idea is that, as an example, if you want something fast, you must sacrifice price and/or quality.

There are a couple of problems with this idea. The most obvious one is that, most of the time, it simply isn’t true. But then, you’d expect somebody who is an advocate of learning Lean thinking to say that. (The other major flaw is that the “quality” in this assertion is, at best, ill-defined, but I’ll deal with that another time.)

I’m certain this assertion about time, speed, and quality isn’t true because of seen so many counterexamples, often having to do with correcting, at no or little cost, poorly managed logistics and poorly design processes.

For example, I have seen many warehouses with badly disorganized shelves. When a customer wants a product, it’s slow to find, which translates to costly in labor. Surely, if we are sacrificing speed and price, it must drive up quality. But of course that’s nonsense. The quality of the customer’s experience suffers, too.

On top of the disorganization, and contributing to it, I’ve seen many situation that are made worse by adding far too much inventory. For lack of room, even if the product is in the right place, products are often stacked in ways that make it difficult or impossible to read the labels.

To add to the problem, in industrial situations, most suppliers use essentially identical brown boxes for different products, the only differentiation between products being the label attached by the manufacturer.

Unfortunately, different manufacturers attach the labels in different orientations so, once they arrive in the warehouse and are placed on the shelves, finding a particular product becomes an exercise in neck-craning and squinting.

Further, labels are often confusing. For example, many fonts use essentially the same shape for the numbers six and nine, with nine simply an upside-down six.

Now take part number 1196 and stack it in the available space with the label sideways, and it can easily be mistaken for part number 1169. Is it any wonder that part number 1170 ends up stocked next to part number 1196? Is it any wonder part number 1170 can’t be found?

The end result of all this twisting, turning, craning, misplacing, and confusion is a massive waste of time. The waste of time necessarily causes slower delivery, increases costs, and lowers the quality of the customer’s experience. And, the business that tolerates such chaos is likely to have costly higher turnover as good employees seek more rewarding work.

In short, you don’t have to choose between price, speed, and quality. You can have all three at the same time — higher prices, lower quality, and less speed.

Or you can master your processes, try to get better labeling practices (no problem for a large enough company, tough for a small one), reduce inventories to rational levels, and set examples yourself of how to keep inventory under control. Do that and you can have lower prices, high quality, and better speed all at the same time, mostly by just paying attention to details. And by not believing destructive business myths.