Introducing Automations in Tulip

Important events happen continuously in operations and it can be overwhelming or impossible to keep up. As a result, production problems persist and opportunities to improve can be missed.

At our Workflows, Elevated event, Tulip announced Automations to help teams streamline operational tasks designed to solve these problems.

Automations in Tulip are purpose built for operations, and bring visual logic editing to manufacturing engineering teams without the need for other systems. Automations will be a tool for you to improve your efficiency, increase your productivity, and build solutions faster in Tulip.

We are simplifying the experience of building logic right in the platform, and opening up more opportunities to get tasks done in the background.

Automations will be available in a beta release over the next few months. Sign up for the beta waitlist now →

You’ll be able to respond to your machines quicker, process data from all of your sources, and build more digital infrastructure with Tulip.

Let’s take a look at what automations brings to the platform:

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: Each Automations 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.

• Create your flow: Add action blocks or decision blocks to identify what tasks the Automation should do. Decision blocks can be used to build conditions, and action blocks can send an email or SMS, update a table record, or run a connector function. Configuring logic blocks and building a flow will feel similar to creating a trigger in a Tulip app.

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

We plan to continue to add more action and event blocks to Automations, including scheduled activities, and repeat actions. Check out the list of currently available blocks →

Automations can be built as simple or as complex as your process requires. Watch Lianna from Tulip build an Automation in just a few minutes:

In addition to versioning, every Automation will have a run history, letting you stay on top of what your Automation is doing, and helping you identify when an Automation fails to run. We will continue to add more functionality over the course of the Automations Beta program.

Automations support all Tulip use cases, and can become another tool for process owners to build solutions and logic in their operations. Over the past few weeks, we have begun putting Automations in the hands of some of our users, including Ryan Infantozzi from VEKA Inc.

In conversations with our team, Ryan explained: “Tulip Automations will play a critical role in communicating with devices that exist on our production floor, and will help send information to our Tulip instance. Automations is going to help us glue everything together.”

To help you start thinking about where an Automation can be used, here are a few examples of how other users are thinking about using Automations:

Stay alerted on machine changes

An Automation can help you respond to machine state changes in real-time, allowing you to dispatch work instructions or alerts to operators to help optimize equipment utilization. When the Machine State changes on a specific machine, an Automation can send an email alert to an operator, and add a new task to a Table with the details of the machine’s state. This table record can populate in an app, providing visual context and guidance for the operator.

Schedule reminders and tasks

Set up logic to ensure that your team has the right training or tasks assigned at the start of their shift. On a schedule, Automations can dispatch reminders over email, SMS, or other business systems like Slack and Teams.

Tulip Automations is coming to select accounts in beta over the next few months. Over the course of the summer we will be reaching out to customers to join the Automations Beta. Our users have been excited about this and we are going to continue to test and iterate throughout the summer to collect feedback.

Automations will be coming to all Tulip plan levels later this year.

We are using and building alongside you so we will have more examples and use cases to share in Community, University, and soon the Tulip Library.

To get started, check out our Knowledge Base docs, or watch the event where we revealed Automations to the world. As you get access to Automations Beta, please send any feedback or feature requests to automations@tulip.co –– we can’t wait to see what you build!

Sign up for the Beta →