Introducing Custom User Roles

Manufacturing IT leadership has to exercise discretion in how it manages user access control across software platforms. Give users too many permissions and you risk vulnerabilities or higher costs. Too few permissions and users won’t be able to accomplish what they need to in the platform.

To address this balancing act, Tulip is introducing custom user roles to give our customers even more control, better governance, and greater flexibility, all with a seamless UX.

With custom user roles, Tulip administrators will no longer be limited to the 13 pre-existing user roles that come with Tulip Enterprise plans. Instead, in addition to those standard user roles, customers will be able to mix and match from over 75 permissions to create the perfect roles to suit their needs and best empower their frontline workers.

Custom user roles is currently in closed beta, but will move to open beta and then become generally available for Enterprise and Regulated Industries customers over the next few months. Connect with your Customer Success or Account Manager if you’re a Tulip customer interested in joining the beta cohort.

Not all organizations have the same governance and access control makeup. Fixed roles therefore cannot satisfy all requirements for all customers. Now, enterprise customers can adapt Tulip’s access control to their own specific user types and hierarchy.

For example, a customer that wants to be able to create a Citizen Developer role that can also add new Operators (i.e. Tulip Player users) can now do so. Or a customer that wants an app engineer role with additional permissions to edit connectors can now create that custom role.

Ultimately, we want Tulip customers to be able to:

• Give users only the access they need; and

• Give some users more access to specific permissions than the current fixed roles allow

This functionality has a major positive impact on Tulip enterprise account owners’ ability to govern the platform and ensure compliance with user access control requirements.

The Tulip platform is designed to help manufacturers ensure governance and access control for users without limiting how many or what kind of users can access the platform. Custom user roles is another step forward in that regard, especially in regulated industries where over-assigning user permissions could mean non-compliance. But the alternative in that scenario is also not ideal — either fewer users in the platform or users that run into access limitations that keep them from doing their job.

Instead, Tulip customers can dial in user permissions to exact specifications. Tulip is committed to providing a robust set of governance features for enterprise manufacturers that can’t afford to choose between adequate user permissions and potential security vulnerabilities.

At first glance it may seem that enabling custom user roles may lead to more work for Tulip account owners and administrators who must manage all of these varying roles and permissions. But the way we have built in this functionality makes it exceedingly straightforward to add, change, or archive roles as needed. This is accomplished in a few ways:

• Simply copy an existing OOTB role, click edit, and select or unselect from a list of checkboxes for various permissions

• Permissions are segmented into categories like Account, Tables, Apps, and Devices/Stations to make them easy to find

• The ability to assign a different role to the same user in separate Tulip Workspaces — one role in one workspace, and another role in a different workspace

• The ability to bulk assign users to a newly created role

This also means that as the organization changes and grows, as employees come and go, and as Tulip also releases new features, it’s easy to update user permissions so they reflect the current state.

Stay tuned for more updates as we move custom user roles closer to general availability!