App Diagrams: The Easiest Way to Understand Your Tulip Apps

Tulip apps are the core building blocks of your digital solutions, with many pieces working together behind the scenes to power intuitive workflows for end users. As your operations grow and change, ensuring shared visibility for global teams into how those apps work becomes paramount. That’s why we’re excited to launch App Diagrams, a feature that enables you to visualize an app’s entire logic flow natively in Tulip.

At the click of a button, you can now generate an intuitive flowchart of a Tulip app’s steps, triggers, transitions, table record updates, and connector function calls. This visualization serves as shared context for anyone at your organization, empowering members of different teams and sites to build and maintain apps throughout their entire lifecycle, and enabling continuous transformation at scale.

App Diagrams are designed for the people who build, maintain, and audit Tulip apps. We saw many customers manually documenting their apps to help understand and communicate complex app logic. Our goal was to make visualizing app functionality a seamless part of everyday workflows within Tulip, eliminating the black boxes that historically came with digital solutions in manufacturing.

Instant Understanding, For Any Team Member: App Diagrams provide a clear map of an app’s logic, removing the need to manually trace relationships or export data to third-party apps. The diagrams instantly reflect any changes and serve as a living blueprint of an app that any user can understand, regardless of who built it.

Improving Collaboration at Scale: App Diagrams also serve as crucial shared context for individuals and teams. The visualizations significantly accelerate knowledge transfer, powering seamless handoffs or co-development of Tulip solutions across individuals, teams, and sites.

From an app’s summary page, click the “Diagram” button to instantly view a diagram of that app’s logic. The flowchart is interactive: you can zoom in, pan, and select elements to see details or navigate to the relevant trigger or step. Each element of the flow is represented clearly (e.g. steps as nodes, transitions as arrows, data updates as icons), giving you a concise map of all possible paths in your app.

Here’s how customers across industries are already using App Diagrams to change how they work:

Streamlined App Design and Wireframing: Instead of Visio or Figma, you can use App Diagrams to sketch out app flows within Tulip, with automatic updates whenever you make a change. During app development, you can share the diagram with end users to understand if the flow aligns with the shop floor process, fostering improved collaboration early on.

Smarter App Investigation and Optimization: App Diagrams empower users to quickly trace app logic and pinpoint areas for optimization or troubleshooting. With a clear visual map, you can efficiently understand and enhance apps built by others. This ensures that apps can be maintained and evolved by any member of the organization.

Accelerate Onboarding and Handoffs: App Diagrams speed up knowledge transfer, since new users of an app can literally see how it works. This reduces ramp-up time for new team members, and drastically simplifies sharing apps across lines or sites. One user shared that App Diagrams saved “a few to several hours of conversations” when handing off a complex app to another teammate.

Instant Documentation: App Diagrams create automatic documentation that can be used by different teams, significantly reducing manual effort for audits and compliance checks. One customer in the Medical Device industry reduced the time needed to document apps from 2-3 days to just 2-3 hours.

More Collaborative App Building: Use App Diagrams as shared context to collaboratively build Tulip apps. By referring to the same visual flow, engineers and process designers can be on the same page, leading to fewer misunderstandings and a faster development cycle. This fosters true co-ownership of the solution across teams.

Bonus: Use App Diagrams to quickly understand apps downloaded from the Tulip Library, so that you can tailor them to your needs.