AllAboutLean.com turned eight years old today. During these years I have written 421 posts plus quite a few pages, helping others in doing lean (and also learning a lot myself!). Time to look back at the last twelve months.
All About Pull Production
My biggest milestone was the publication of my book All About Pull Production: Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Kanban, CONWIP, and other Pull Systems in Lean Production in April 2021. This is a practical guide for anyone looking to implement pull systems. It is not a high-level philosophical discussion of lean, but a book to help you roll up your sleeves and get the job done. It is written for the practitioner. With a foreword by John Shook.
The book has been very well received, and is also selling well. Besides English, multiple translations are in preparation, including
- German (Alles über Verbrauchssteuerung, translated by me, which should be available before the end of the year),
- Spanish (Todo sobre Producción Pull, translated by Jorge Valle from LEAN Transforma), and
- Chinese (关于拉动生产的一切 translated by 涛杰 华 [Taojie] from Bosch).
- Farsi is planned by Kazem Moutabian from the Iran Lean Institute,
- Italian by Roberto Ronzani from the Istituto Lean Management, and
- Brazilian Portugese (Tudo sobre Produção Puxada translated by Wellington Batista from The Lean Times).
Many thanks to all translators! Please let me know if you are interested in translating other languages.
Collected Blog Posts of AllAboutLean.com 2020
My book All About Pull Production was not the only book I published. I also continued to publish my annual collection of blog posts, by now in its 8th volume Collected Blog Posts of AllAboutLean.com 2020. This is simply a (minimally edited) collection of all blog posts of the year 2020.
Since my blog posts are available for free on my blog, I also make this book (and all others in this Collected Blog Posts of AllAboutLean.com series) available for free as a PDF. It is also available almost free as an ebook on Amazon. It is also available as a paperback on Amazon, but due to the color printing that is a bit more expensive.
Most Popular Posts
The top ten posts for this year were as follows:
- How Cheap Can You Make it?
- The Kingman Formula – Variation, Utilization, and Lead Time
- The Inner Workings of Amazon Fulfillment Centers – Part 2
- Production Sequences: FCFS, EDD, and Others
- The History of Manufacturing – Part 1: Prehistory to Antiquity
- Line Layout Strategies – Part 2: I-, U-, S-, and L-Lines
- What Exactly Is Jidoka?
- What Is Your Production Capacity?
- The Amazon Robotics Family: Kiva, Pegasus, Xanthus, and more…
- The (True) Difference Between Push and Pull (This one is probably the most popular post of all time. It makes the top of the list every year since it was first published in 2015.)
Organizational
I also had some minor changes in the background of my blog. Nothing that you as a reader would really notice, but for example I disabled TrackBack (automatic back-links if someone posts a link to my blog) since I was getting too much spam through this. I also tried out a CDN (content delivery network) to make my website load faster. However, this turned out to be buggy, so I switched it off again. In any case, since I have no advertising, a pretty lean and lightweight WordPress theme (GeneratePress), and almost no cookies (I try to protect your privacy!), my website is pretty fast even without a CDN.
As my website is getting more popular, I am also getting more and more dubious offers. I regularly get contacted by others offering to write me a “higH quAliTy” article on topics highly related to my website like … dog food???? What the….?
I really did a double-take when I saw that offer. In any case, I get such requests so frequently nowadays that I don’t even bother to answer. So far, all of the content on my blog has been written by me only (with the sole exception being a guest post by John Shook, but that is very high-quality content!).
I also get more and more offers promising me to make my website much more visible on Google, but these offers also get refused. Besides, I don’t want anybody messing around with my blog posts (except, of course, Christy, my trusted spell checker, who works very hard to make me sound intelligent 😉 ).
Anyway, I enjoyed writing all about lean for you, and it gave me something to do during the home office pandemic. I hope my work is helpful for you, and that you will keep on reading. Thanks for your interest in my work. Now go out and organize your industry!
Thanks a lot, Christoph for your excellent posts. With all your examples you have made lean concepts easy to understand and apply.
Happy Birthday, AllAboutLean.com! Keep on making terrific content! I really appreciate your work, and love your sense of humour 🙂
BTW, I’d love to have your book ” All About Pull Production…” in Polish.
Professor Roser,
Congratulations on the initiative to share your experience with the world. I found your blog in 2015, since then, your knowledge and especially your questions about what Lean Manufacturing really is, made me rethink and also question many distorted practices that I accepted as true. Besides Lean, obviously, your blog helped me to improve my English, and I feel honored to be able to contribute with your work, translating your articles into Portuguese through The Lean Times, and also your latest book. I wish you health, happiness and may we celebrate many allaboutlean.com birthdays. All the best from Brazil.
Thank you Christoph for your contribution to the Lean and production community 👍
Dear Professor,
8 years learning a little more every week.
as always …. thank you very much.
I toast for 8 more years!
Many thanks to all for the praise 🙂
Dear Professor Christop Roser,
I discovered your site years ago and I found out an incredible real mine for young or “old” students (old because even if we have been working from a lot of years, we have to learn every day): thank you very much for your knowledge spreading to all of us, in a simple and very effective way.
Chapeau!
Glad I’m not the only one looking for improvement
Congratulations Christoph. I hope you continue to do better and better. Thank you for teaching intelligible lean to many illiterate in the subject like me.
All the best.
Dear Prof. Roser, congratulations to the 8th Birthday of AllAboutLean, I’ve followed the blog for more than one year, and the contents really helped me a lot with my daily work of managing assembly lines. Greetings from China!
Thank you Christie Christoph, I discovered your blog by accident, and was this a very good accident to have stumbled upon. I look forward to blogs and it has really opened up many new thinkings for me. Will done once again.
Hi Chris,
Hearty Congratulations on these glorious 8 years of breathing and living lean!
Your commitment and passion for the subject are par excellence.
Also many thanks for supporting us at the Indian Institute of Materials Management,
Bangalore, India by agreeing to share your expertise and insights on Lean, IoT on two occasions!
Wishing you many more years of engagement with all Lean lovers across the globe!
Regards,
B. Jayaraman,
Chairman, IIMM,
Bangalore Branch, India
Hello all, again many thanks for the kind words. keep on reading!