Happy 6th Birthday, AllAboutLean.com

Oh my gosh, it is six years already and 317 blog posts! Like clockwork every week, one blog post with at least 1,000 words. Time to celebrate again! Many thanks to all for reading and commenting. I am looking forward to keep this up for many more years to come.

Most Popular Posts

The top ten blog posts of this year were in ascending order:

1. How Many Kanbans? – The Kanban Formula Part 1 with 9,155 clicks.
2. All About Spaghetti Diagrams with 10,066 clicks.
3. All About Swim Lane Diagrams with 10,451 clicks.
4. Introduction to Karakuri Kaizen with 11,159 clicks.
5. Line Layout Strategies – Part 2: I-, U-, S-, and L-Lines with 12,828 clicks.
6. How to Measure Cycle Times – Part 1 with 13,138 clicks.
7. What Is Your Production Capacity? with 16,195 clicks.
8. Visual Management with 16,336 clicks.
9. Glossary of Lean Production Related Terms with 17,523 clicks – this one now has over 430 entries, and more are in the pipeline.
10. The (True) Difference Between Push and Pull with 22,776 clicks – this one is quite popular and made the Top 10 list pretty much every year since I wrote it in 2015.

The popularity of my blog was also steadily increasing, and I was approaching almost 3,000 clicks per day in February, being among the top 350,000 websites in the United States according to Alexa.

Another blogger somewhere wrote that in order to be a successful blogger, you should spend 20% of your effort on creating content, and 80% of your effort on promoting your content. However, I don’t necessarily want to be a successful blogger but primarily a good blogger, and for me it is almost in reverse. I spend 80% of the time creating content, and 20% of the time promoting it. Hence, I will just keep on writing, because I really enjoy writing about lean.

Upcoming Stuff

At the beginning of July, a couple of friends and I organized a non-profit tour through south Germany to study Industry 4.0. This of course resulted in a series of blog posts on the state of Industry 4.0 in Germany. This series with six or more posts will kick off next week on Tuesday, September 10, and take you through Bosch, Kärcher, Trumpf, Siemens, ABB Stotz-Kontakt, Audi, and many more. I hope you will like it.

I am also working on a series of collected volumes based on my blog. These are nothing else but my blog posts collected in the form of a book, with one volume for each year.  Since my blog is already available for free, I will also provide a free download of the PDF and Ebook files on my blog. If you want a paper version, it will be available by print-on-demand through Amazon, although this won’t be free. The idea is that some of you may want to download the content of my blog to have it on your own hard disk.

I am also working on a second series of books on different lean topics. While they are also still based on my blog posts, they are heavily edited, lots of content added, and put into a consistent structure so that it makes a consistent reading. The first book will be on pull production. Hopefully it will be ready next year (but then, I said this already last year …). Anyway, it is in the works.

Awards and Praise

In February I received a very nice email from Anuj Agarwal, founder of Feedspot. They curate a list of Lean Manufacturing blogs, and AllAboutLean made it into the Top Twenty. Check out their list of the top 20 manufacturing blogs for other great lean blogs!

Kanbanize selected 19 lean blogs worth reading, and, guess what, I made the list :). They are a software provider for lean and agile project management.

I also received lots of positive comments from you on the blog in general or articles in particular. Below is just a small selection

Excellent article! The writer walks the talk. He did a good job in putting credible details for the reader’s appreciation. Thanks! (Rey Elbo at Pay Attention to Details – Operator Training at Toyota and Scania)

Great reading and back ground (Terry Brook on TWI)

Thank you for this excellent article. I learned something new with each job that you published. Congratulations. (Pedro Chipana at Hoshin Kanri)

I want to praise everything you write on about on your blog, I am constant reader and always looking forward to new posts (Dimitrije on Maintaining Weak FIFO in Parallel FIFO Lanes)

I could go on and cite many more comments. Your comments definitely motivate me to keep up the writing. Many thanks to all for commenting here, on LinkedIn, or elsewhere.

Odd Requests…

On the other end, popularity comes at a price, and I am getting repeated requests from others to write articles for my blog – although I don’t really see how e.g. a travel report would fit into lean manufacturing?!?! In any case, I decline all such requests to keep the quality high (or at least I hope to do so). Everything written here (for better or for worse) is by me. Only the spelling is checked externally, because this is definitely not my strong point.

A while back I also wrote on the historic Toyoda Model G loom, a museum piece that was groundbreaking in 1920, but has been long since overtaken by better products.  Since then I have been getting repeated requests from India if they can buy it from me, that I should send a catalog with loom models and spare parts, and prices in rupees, and apparently they seriously want to buy an almost 100-year-old loom to start production. Highly interesting. In any case, I have no looms to sell, please stop asking!

Summary

Overall, another successful year of blogging comes to an end, and I am looking forward for the next year. As of now I am in no danger of running out of topics. My “idea for a blog post” list has way over 200 entries. This should last another four years, and the list is usually getting longer rather than shorter. Anyway, many thanks for reading and commenting, keep on reading and commenting! Now, go out, use lean in whichever way fits your situation, and organize your industry!