Build, Govern, Scale: Key Takeaways from the Virtual Event

We kicked off our latest virtual event on March 6, digging into the ways growing manufacturers can future-proof operations and govern global teams with Tulip’s no-code platform for frontline workers. Read on to hear some of the insights that emerged from the speakers and thought leaders featured in the event—and to find out where you can go to watch replays of the sessions.

Overseeing hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of frontline manufacturing workers across dozens of global facilities can be daunting and complex. And certainly there are a lot of practices, technologies and tactics that you should have in place in order to successfully manage teams at that level. But for organizations that are embarking on a journey to enterprise scale, or even those already at that point, it’s important to remember that governance happens first at the operator and machine level.

During the tour of the Tulip Experience Center in Budapest, Ecosystem Engineer Adam Veres showed us how Tulip integrates with the machines, sensors and devices you find on manufacturing floors across sectors.

The ability to ensure individual operators have the right level of control while they perform their day-to-day work is critical—especially if you then want to scale systems across a site or to multiple sites. But it’s also necessary to empower site managers and IT leadership with the right oversight tools to maintain security and compliance without interrupting workflows or hampering individual contributions.

Features like custom user roles and workspaces offer control with flexibility—features that Product Manager Pete Hartnett detailed in his product & roadmap session, along with a number of other capabilities that enable governance for a one site or a hundred:

"We have a robust set of features and capabilities that are available to Tulip customers today to address all of these different items and issues and other areas of concern. Beyond that, our product teams are in a constant conversation with our customers, prospects, partners, and advisors to keep a pulse on what manufacturers are looking for at an enterprise level, so our roadmap puts a high value on these sorts of features."

Erik Mirandette, Tulip's Chief Business Officer, walked the audience through Tulip’s position of an enterprise-grade platform that powers global manufacturing. This isn’t a far-off vision—it’s the way the platform is built, with composability, extensibility, and connectivity as core attributes that unlock scale. Event attendees caught a glimpse of Tulip’s Mission Control room, highlighting the hundreds of simultaneous events and devices in operation at customer sites all over the world.

This type of interconnectivity and deftness despite many actions and events in many locations is precisely what draws some of the largest, most complex manufacturers to Tulip’s platform. As Michael Horn, Executive Board Member with DMG Mori, put it, “In just 18 months, we rolled out Tulip in all our 15 sites; over 1000 stations implemented into our plants, everywhere you need seamless information and real-time availability of data and information.”

Part of that agility comes as a result of Tulip’s cloud-native approach, as Rony Kubat told Mason Glidden during a wide-ranging conversation that touched on all things cloud, security and infrastructure. Platforms built expressly for cloud deployment offer advantages over on-prem counterparts that must ultimately be lifted and shifted during any digitization or transformation effort.

“There's a resiliency to the intermittent, right?” Rony explained. “So if I'm in a traditional on-prem situation, if I'm going to double my load, and all of a sudden something happens, I might just run out and I’m just stuck. Whereas when you're in a multi-tenant cloud, that's a fraction of a percent of load across the entire base."

For many manufacturers, the ability to improve operations and govern teams at one facility is good, but connecting that facility to a network of sites all tied together with a common framework and system is what unlocks real value.

During her session, Global Head of Customer Success Jessica Yen emphasized the importance of building and following a strategic framework for governance.

“If your company is looking to drive change to the way it typically does business, you're going to need a governance structure to help push progress, identify, escalate, and remove roadblocks, and also to ensure compliance within your organization,” she said. “Governance is what will help you build a citizen developer program, particularly one that's global, with standard trainings to ensure people have the necessary skill sets, and also to set best practice sharing and provide oversight to what citizen developers can and maybe can't do.”

Part of the strategy of building a global structure is to empower and augment the right people at every step of the journey. Phil Long of McKinsey & Company talked about that during an interview session that illuminated how his organization thinks about digital transformation and building for scale.

“We start by helping the first site structure the setup, put together the right skill sets, develop the right skill sets, and have them positioned for success to take over the initiative and transformation on their own. And then we help them take those skills they developed at a single facility to the next level of the web that might extend out to 10, 15, or many more facilities beyond that. But the whole point is that you need to have real ownership of these initiatives at every single location.”

Everything event speakers discussed nodded to the ultimate goal for an operations platform—to augment frontline workers with tools to help them get their work done better, faster, and with fewer risks of error. Phil Long made this the trend he’s most excited about when he thinks about the future of manufacturing, saying it’s about helping frontline workers “realize even more efficiencies, even more capabilities … that's the concept that I find most exciting for the next stage.”

While this article went through the main takeaways, you can gain even deeper insights about building a deploying a manufacturing operations platform at scale by watching the full event at the link below.