Happy 7th Birthday AllAboutLean.com

Today, AllAboutLean.com turns seven years old. Hurray! Amazing how fast time flies. Time to look back again on what happened. This is my 370th post on this blog. For seven years I have published a blog post every week going into the details of lean manufacturing and related topics (and once per year a birthday celebration post).

Most Popular Posts

The top ten posts for this year were as follows:

1. Visual Management
2. Good and Bad Ways to Calculate the OEE
3. All About Spaghetti Diagrams
4. Introduction to Karakuri Kaizen
5. What Exactly Is Jidoka?
6. How to Measure Cycle Times – Part 1
7. Line Layout Strategies – Part 2: I-, U-, S-, and L-Lines
8. What Is Your Production Capacity?
9. The Seven Types of Waste (Muda) – Now with 24 More Types of Waste Absolutely Free!
10. The (True) Difference Between Push and Pull

Collected Blog Posts Book Series Published

At the beginning of the year, I published my series of collected blog posts books. For each year of this blog, there is one volume containing its blog posts. Hence, we have the following books.

• Collected Blog Post of AllAboutLean.com 2013
• Collected Blog Post of AllAboutLean.com 2014
• Collected Blog Post of AllAboutLean.com 2015
• Collected Blog Post of AllAboutLean.com 2016
• Collected Blog Post of AllAboutLean.com 2017
• Collected Blog Post of AllAboutLean.com 2018
• Collected Blog Post of AllAboutLean.com 2019
• ( 2020 will come next year)

So, if you want to have all of my blog posts as a book, they are all available. Since my blog is free, the PDF files can all be downloaded for free too here on this blog. If you prefer the Kindle version, it is also available on Amazon for a token amount (I can’t make them completely free on Amazon). If you prefer the printed version, you can find them on Amazon too. However, a 300-400 page color print paperback is not cheap. Especially with the free PDF competition, I don’t expect to sell many printed collection books. On the plus side, it gave me 344 publications for the internal system at my university, which puts me far, far ahead of any other professor 🙂 . Not that I get any benefit beyond the bragging rights, but I just love to test how easy it is to manipulate KPIs.

Upcoming Book on Pull Systems

Besides the collected blog posts, I am also working on a *real* book: All About Pull Production: Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Kanban, CONWIP and other Pull Systems in Lean Production. I have been promising this to you since quite some time now. But the first draft is complete, and currently under review with other qualified lean people. With a bit of luck, it will be available before the end of the year. In this book I will look in great detail on the different pull systems, which one to use when, and how to set them up, make the layout, implement, and maintain them. The focus is on practical use. It will be probably in excess of 300 pages purely on pull. The top level chapters are:

1. Introduction
2. Fundamentals of Pull Systems
3. Comparison of Different Pull Systems
4. FIFO and Other Limited Buffer Inventories
5. Kanban
6. CONWIP
7. POLCA
8. Reorder Point
9. COBACABANA
10. Drum-Buffer-Rope
11. Pull System Layout
12. Pull System Ramp Up
13. Pull System Maintenance
14. Summary

I will definitely let you know through this blog and my social media when it comes out. I hope you will like it and that it will help you with your work!

Faster Website Style

After seven years, I thought it was time to change the style of this website a bit. I was still using the 2013 standard WordPress theme, and it was getting a bit dated. Hence, I switched the theme to GeneratePress, with a few new modifications of my own. It is a very lightweight theme and makes for fast loading times. The only element that was slowing it down was the Google Captcha, so I turned it off. The amount of spam has correspondingly increased, but my spam filters are quite good, and very little makes it through. I may switch it back on eventually if the spam gets too much.

But now my website is blazingly fast. It gets the rare 100% at Google Page Speed Insights for desktops, and a still very good 92–99% for mobile phones. There are also now almost no cookies when you visit my blog. I do want to protect your privacy!

Of course, mistakes also happen. I managed to avoid it for almost seven years, but this year I pressed the wrong button and published a post that was not yet done. The second post on workers safety during Corona was pushed into the mailing list about four weeks too early. I of course unpublished the post, but I could not recall the emails. Hence, some of you may have finally seen my beautiful 404 File not Found page 🙂 . My apologies!

Awards and Praise

Like every year, I get lots of positive comments on my blog. The LeanLab and the LeanVLog created a video with the top Lean websites, and AllAboutLean.com was included!

I also got praise from different people through LinkedIn and other channels:

• I want to let you know about a great series of articles on the subject of “sequencing”: putting the production schedule into the optimum order. Christoph Roser has created a tutorial on how to go about actually doing this. (Richard D. Rahn via LinkedIn)
• This AllAboutLean blog post by Christoph Roser contains an extensive list of Lean terminology that goes far beyond any other Lean glossary I’ve seen. If you need to look up a term, this is the place to go. (Lauren Y. Hansen via LinkedIn)
• All these days from 1980 I was specialized in Lean & Lean six sigma as a Professor & CEO having 50 years of experience in industry You article educated me more. (Prof. Rammohun)
• Wow, Fantastic write up on the JIS, that starts from the Prerequisite till the post implementation problems & its solution, the person who don’t even know what is JIS also can understand, with the given picture illustrations, Great Work..!!! (Vasantha Kumar commenting on my article on Just In Sequence)
  
• Dear Christoph, thanks for the excellent series of articles. (Bernd commenting on Flexible Manpower Lines)
• … and many more 🙂

There were more compliments, of course. This is only a small selection. However, the gods of Google seem to like me less. Instead of 3,000 clicks per day, I get now only around 2,500 clicks per day. Or maybe it is because a lot of my readers are in the home office… 🙂 Anyway, I enjoy the writing and will keep on publishing the stuff I know on Lean. Now, go out, (or stay in the home office), keep on reading, and organize your industry!