This comment thread is making me realize we don't have a good word to distinguish between efficiency as in "we only have 7 hospital beds because that's all we need on 99% of each day" and efficiency as in "we replaced steps X,Y,Z with just step X', because we found that X' could accomplish everything that XYZ could accomplish but it's faster, more accurate, and cheaper".
One makes a tradeoff by reducing overheads and buffers, and the other doesn't have any tradeoffs, it's just a better way of doing things based on novel techniques.
One makes a tradeoff by reducing overheads and buffers, and the other doesn't have any tradeoffs, it's just a better way of doing things based on novel techniques.