Happy 10th Birthday, AllAboutLean.com

It has been ten years since I started this blog. When I first posted on September 1, 2013, I never though that it would go on this long. But it has. Now there are 525 blog posts (or 663 if you include the Chinese and German translations) and a total of 765 000 words with (mostly?) high-quality content on lean manufacturing and related topics. Time to look back and also to celebrate!

Awards

The main award was not for my blog, but for my book All About Pull Production. This work received the prestigious Shingo Publication Award! Excellent! The book is also selling well.

The book also made it on the list of the Top 10 Books on Lean Management, Lean Production, And Toyota History by Katie Andersson. Many thanks, Katie!

And, last but not least, one of my other books, Faster, Better, Cheaper in the History of Manufacturing: From the Stone Age to Lean Manufacturing and Beyond, made it onto the Umbrex Best Books on the Manufacturing Industry list. I am actually working on a revised and updated version, hopefully to be published in 2024.

Publications

There are also even more translations of my book All About Pull Production now. Besides the English, German, Spanish (thanks to Jorge Valle from Lean Transforma), and Brazilian Portuguese (thanks to Wellington Batista do DataLEAN) translations, the book was also translated into Italian (thanks to Roberto Ronzani and Sabrina Ramin from the Istituto Lean Management) and French (thanks to Laurence Drabik and Pierre Jannez from Operae Partners) last year. A Ukrainian translation is in the works (thanks to Serhii Komberianov from the Lean Institute Ukraine), the Chinese edition is almost complete (thanks to 涛杰 华 (Taojie) and Xie Xuan) albeit it may take eighteen more months for the actual publishing process in China), and a Polish translation may be started soon (thanks to Jakub Kocjan from Lean Systems).

Most Popular Posts

As I do every year, here are the top ten posts. There continues to be a lot of interest in Amazon and its technology. The second most popular post is an older post on lean in the Japanese toilet, which is definitely a fun read! But the number one spot is on the difference between the Toyota Production System and Lean Manufacturing—a very recent post but with a lot of comments both here and on LinkedIn.

1. Toyota Standard Work – Part 2: Standard Work Combination Table
2. The Inner Workings of Amazon Fulfillment Centers – Part 3
3. What Is Ikigai?
4. The Amazon Robotics Family: Kiva, Pegasus, Xanthus, and more…
5. The Inner Workings of Amazon Fulfillment Centers – Part 4
6. Line Layout Strategies – Part 2: I-, U-, S-, and L-Lines
7. Hoshin Kanri – Part 4: The X-Matrix?
8. Different Ways to Do Kaizen
9. Tales from Japan – Lean in the Japanese Public Toilet
10. The Difference between the Toyota Production System and Lean Manufacturing

Incorporation

Since the requests I receive for consulting and training are continuously increasing, I got together with my business partner and started the AALean GmbH. I am in the progress of transferring the brand AllAboutLean and the blog to this newly created company. Business is doing well, and even though we are barely two months old we have been active in the USA, Dubai, Spain, and Germany so far. More activities are upcoming, like a slight redesign of the blog (no worries, the content will stay free!). There are also plans to publish more videos to our AllAboutLean.com YouTube Channel. The impressum and privacy policy will soon be updated to reflect this.

Organizational

There were also some organizational changes. For one, I quit Twitter nine months ago. Not that I was very active, but I published my blog posts also on Twitter. However, I always had the feeling that there are more bots than humans on there. In any case, the increasingly strange behavior of Elon Musk turned me off Twitter. Since then he has continued his eccentric behavior, and Twitter is now “X.” I guess you could say that “Twitter is now my eX” and I clicked the Twitter symbol “X” in the upper right corner of my browser. I guess being a billionaire can do weird things to your character.

I also started to use AI for some illustrations. In particular I used DALL·E for some eye candy images. As they are created by an AI and not a human, they are also in public domain. I also started to use ChatGPT, but NOT to write my blog posts! The quality of ChatGPT is not too bad, but definitely not good enough for my own standards. But I find it helpful in structuring and giving ideas… which of course I always verify beforehand and divide the good from the bad before including them in my posts. Again, I want to emphasize that I still write all blog posts myself! As of now, I think I can still do a much better job on this than an AI. But I am not sure if you ask me again in twenty years.

I am also in the process of removing the popular Jetpack plugin from my blog. This program has become too intrusive, and may clash with German privacy regulations. But, since it is so deeply ingrained in many WordPress sites, it is not easy to simply rip it out. It is a work in progress, but I do put in the effort to protect your privacy.

Overall, it has been another fun year with lots of good feedback from you, dear readers. I also got a very nice AllAboutLean Birthday cake from my niece for my own birthday! So, thank you very much for continuing to frequent my site and for reading my works. Now, go out, keep on reading, implement what you read and organize your industry!