What's New with Automations

Automations are here! Our robust logic workflow tool is now widely available to all Tulip customers.

With Automations, you can stay one step ahead of what happens on the shop floor and create powerful logic that executes tasks in the background. Automations brings the principles of modern business workflow tools to the Tulip platform in the context of operations and manufacturing, enabling you to build a more digital infrastructure with Tulip.

Join the many teams around the world who use Tulip to simplify their app logic, create alerts and notifications to respond to events in your plant, schedule recurring tasks and reminders for operators and engineers, and transfer and process data between your systems.

Let's take a look at what's new in automations:

Automations are a series of logic blocks that start with an event, and help you visualize your logic on a canvas. Any number of blocks can be added and deleted to create your logic.

Here’s how it works:

• Start with an event: Every automation starts with a single event. Events can be outputs or changes from a machine, updates to a table, or activity related to a user or apps. Automations can also be set to run on a regular schedule, such as the start of a shift.

• Create your flow: Add action blocks, decision blocks, or loops to determine what an automation should do. Decision blocks can be used to evaluate conditions, and action blocks can send an email or SMS, update a table record or variable, translate data with AI, or execute a connector function. Looping is a powerful feature in automations that allows you to perform actions multiple times. Configuring logic blocks and building a flow will feel similar to creating a trigger in a Tulip app.

• Activate your logic: Automations can be published and locked when you are ready to deploy them in production. Authorized user roles can turn automations on or off to ensure you have control over when they run.

Just like apps, automations take advantage of variables and expressions, letting app builders create calculations and store important data.

Learn more about how you can get started bringing your automations to life →

Automations can be built as simple or as complex as your process requires. In addition to versioning, each automation has a run history, so you can keep track of what your automation is doing and identify when an automation is not running. You can track how many tasks your automations are using on the Usage page of your account.

Hear from Jake Rigos as he walks you through how to build an automation in just a few minutes:

Automations can be used across operations in parallel with apps to support your Tulip use cases, and are another tool for process owners and IT teams to build solutions and business logic in their organization.

To help you think about where an automation can be used, here are some examples of how other users are thinking about using automations:

Alerts and notifications

Respond to machine downtime

Automations and machine monitoring can be combined to optimize equipment utilization. For example, when machine health changes on a particular machine, an automation can send an email alert to an operator and add a new task to a table of machine health details. This table record can be populated in an app, providing visual context and guidance to the operator.

Monitoring conditions

With a Tulip edge device and sensor, you can set up simple automation to monitor the conditions of a room or environment and send an alert when the sensor detects a change.

Inventory control

When inventory levels in a Tulip table reach a critical number or threshold, notify the right team members or place an internal order to avoid stock-outs.

Try an Automation for inventory control in the Tulip Library →

Faster non-conformance reporting

When operators discover or report defects within apps, an automation can listen for a new table record and trigger a workflow that can alert a supervisor, generate a report, or log the relevant data collected by the operator for later analysis.

Schedule reminders and tasks

With automations, you can set up logic to ensure your team has the right training or tasks assigned at the start of their shift. Audits for maintenance, inspection, equipment calibration, or cleaning can be sent and assigned to an individual or team. Once a week or once a day, an automation can send out training reminders at the start of the shift via email, SMS, or other business systems such as Slack and Teams.

Transferring and processing data

By taking advantage of connector functions in Automations, your team can move more business system logic out of apps and into self-contained, manageable processes. Some teams use Automations to import and export records from ERPs when orders are completed or updated. If you want to loop through a large list of data and export it to a BI tool at the end of a shift, you can use scheduled automations to save time and streamline the process.

Tulip automations are flexible and take advantage of concepts you've come to know and love throughout the platform: if you need to translate operator notes or root cause analysis documents, you can build logic to process the data into a standard language using Frontline Copilot™'s Translate action before exchanging data with other systems.

Any Tulip customer can start using Automations today. Scheduling functionality will be available for Enterprise and Regulated Industries plans. Additionally, for teams on a Long-Term Support release schedule, Automations will be available out of beta in LTS 13 at the end of September 2024.

To help you get started with automations, each plan includes a number of automation tasks. If you need more tasks, or want to explore other ways to get more out of your allotted automations, you can contact your Tulip account representative.

For more details on limits, and resources to get started building your own logic, check out the Knowledge Base. We will continue to host community events, share tips and best practices, and create examples in the Tulip Library.

If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us at automations@tulip.co — we can’t wait to see what you build!