Meet the 2026 Tulip Groundbreakers

Every year, the Groundbreaker Awards celebrate the heart of the Tulip community: the builders, teams, and partners who looked at "that's just how it works" and decided it didn't have to stay that way. This year, we gathered on the eve of Operations Calling 2026 to recognize 17 winners across four categories, from industries spanning window extrusion to luxury jewelry to animal pharmaceuticals. Some taught themselves to build on top of a demanding day job. Some convinced an entire site or company to rethink how it works. Others showed up for their customers again and again until the hardest part of the work became routine.

Tulip started with a simple bet: give the people closest to the problem the tools to solve it, and they will. The 2026 winners are proof that the bet is paying off, and that changing an industry takes a global community.

We are thrilled to officially announce and congratulate the 2026 Groundbreaker Award winners!

The Golden Shovel Award honors the individual builders leading on the frontlines of operations. These are the people closest to the work, who saw a problem worth solving and built the solution themselves with Tulip. This year's winners come from manufacturing operations, quality, and software engineering, and they show that a builder can come from anywhere. Each pairs deep operational knowledge with the right tools to drive meaningful change on the shop floor.

Mollie Serbin, Manager, Digital Manufacturing Platforms, Haemonetics

As Manager of Digital Manufacturing Platforms at Haemonetics, Mollie Serbin has become the engine behind one of the most ambitious electronic device history record (eDHR) programs in medical device manufacturing. She took an application suite from proof of concept to production release in just six weeks at Haemonetics' Utah site, cutting the paper DHR correction rate from 56% to near zero. In the centrifuge repair process, her eDHR solution delivered a 140-160% output increase and halved operator training time while all but eliminating GDP errors. Mollie is now leading a simultaneous eDHR rollout across six global sites, architecting data models, integrating systems, and enabling champions at every location. With a Center of Excellence model taking shape and newer builders learning from her, Mollie is scaling not just applications but the capability to build them

Louisa Stegman, Digital Manufacturing Process Manager, Avantor Fluid Handling

When Avantor Fluid Handling set out to replace paper batch records, Louisa Stegman led the Devens, Massachusetts site to become the first in the company to go live with Tulip - on time and under budget. As both project manager and app developer, Louisa built electronic batch record applications tailored to each department while holding the line on quality, compliance, and traceability. Her eBR Manager application has sharply reduced manual documentation and accelerated batch record review and approval across the site. Just as important as what she built is how she built it: Louisa assembled a cross-functional team of subject matter experts spanning Manufacturing, Quality, Engineering, and Validation, and set up feedback loops with end users that continue to shape every revision. She is now helping other Avantor sites onboard, carrying the Devens playbook across the network.

Scott Hamilton Jr, Digital Factory Technician, Molex

Scott Hamilton Jr is continually enhancing quality, now pushing what’s possible by integrating and controlling test equipment. At AirBorn, a Molex company, Scott built a fully automated test system for VPX power supplies, integrating Tulip with complex electronic test equipment through TCP/IP, SCPI commands, custom JavaScript, and connector functions. The system walks operators through each test sequence, communicates directly with the equipment, captures results for every unit, and returns clear pass/fail feedback. This has cut test time from one hour to ten minutes. He also developed a system to control the position of USB thermal imaging cameras, driven with Tulip, using custom Node-RED nodes and a sidecar application. Having grown into the role from maintenance, Scott has built what Tulip's own team has called one of the most complex solutions we've seen, and Molex Corporate is now evaluating it to scale company-wide.

Ruairi McMahon, Digital Transformation Lead, Irish Aerospace Manufacturing Company

Ruairi McMahon has built one of the most thoroughly connected shop floors in the community. At an Irish Aerospace Manufacturing Company, Ruairi replaced paper torque logs with a live integration that reads values straight off the torque testers via the Machine API and checks them against ERP-controlled tolerances in real time. He connected the site's CNC machines for live cycle-time and efficiency tracking across 12-hour shifts, replaced handwritten inspection sheets with barcode-driven quality apps, and built a network of factory display screens, including large-format performance boards across the roughly 40-machine Davenport area, that has sparked visible competition between production cells. Tying it all together is a management reporting layer that gives leadership a single source of truth it never had. Ruairi also executed the company's post-acquisition cutover to the new parent company's platform instance flawlessly, and shares his work openly with the community.

The Greenhouse Award recognizes the teams that turned a good idea into a new way of working for an entire organization. A single app or a single line is where it starts, but these teams created the conditions for it to spread across sites, functions, and cultures. This year's winners show what happens when collaboration, governance, and a continuous improvement mindset take root at scale.

Tiffany & Co.

At Tiffany & Co., the Process Development & Technology team turned processes built on manual instructions and paper records into a comprehensive digital manufacturing solution, one that now spans new product integration, production management, and craft upskilling. Rather than building isolated apps, the team developed standardized templates, shared components, and common data structures, a composable approach that let them scale across processes and departments without losing governance or consistency. This approach was adopted across Process Engineering and New Product Integration, helping drive standardization and scalability throughout manufacturing operations. Production and quality data is now captured at the point of work, giving the organization real-time visibility that previously did not exist, along with measurable gains in productivity, quality, compliance, and cycle time. The team's defining trait is who does the building: technicians, engineers, and business users all shape the applications they use every day. What began as a single solution has become a scalable digital ecosystem and a repeatable framework for the rest of the business.

PL Developments

PL Developments manufactures for many of the biggest names in consumer health, and its Piedmont, South Carolina site runs under the documentation requirements that come with that work. Batch records were lengthy, and the review and reconciliation process carried a number of non-value-added steps — manual transcription, repeated verification passes, and reconciliation that could not begin until a run was complete. None of it was unusual for the industry. All of it was an opportunity.

The team built full electronic batch records across multiple consumer packaged goods lines. The clearest measure of the change is structural: reconciling batch records used to require a dedicated group whose job was exactly that. With records now reconciled as the batch runs, that standing function is no longer needed, and the work it used to absorb has gone back into the operation.

Amazon Robotics

Amazon Robotics builds the mobile robotics and manipulation systems that power its fulfillment centers worldwide, manufactured across two Massachusetts sites - mobile robotics in North Reading, manipulation in Westborough. Tulip went live on the first product in under four months with zero disruption during cutover, and the legacy system was fully retired within the year. Governance was built in from the start rather than bolted on after, and the team has become one of the platform's most engaged user bases, adopting new functionality early and often. A notable result: an automated end-of-line backflush to Oracle EBS that has run error-free in production, eliminating a manual validation step the team had long carried by hand. From there, the rollout scaled fast, generation by generation - Pegasus-Large, then Hercules, then Proteus and TCC - each hitting its standard build rate within a day or two of go-live.

Richemont

Across Richemont's maisons, a small team has been running one of the most disciplined multi-site digitalization programs in luxury manufacturing. Over three years they have led Tulip implementation across manufacturing sites spanning multiple Maisons and Richemont entities - including Cartier, Montblanc, IWC, Val Fleurier, Varinor and Van Cleef & Arpels - simplifying the experience for 2,500+ operators through deep SAP integration across production, logistics, and quality.The approach is deliberately shared: each site built is own application based on shared and centralized components : a rich business use-case apps library, enterprise system connector, IIOT device integration; site adapt, compose and fine tune for their own local need. That has given Richemont a pattern it can repeat, with further sites going live and a multi-year roadmap ahead.What Tulip provides that SAP alone cannot is the operator's side of the equation, an interface artisans actually want to use, plus real-time data capture that feeds decisions and reporting directly back into the core ERP - alongside use cases such as time tracking and precious-material traceability that SAP was never going to deliver on its own.

Ceva Sante Animale

Ceva Sante Animale's Tulip core team built an electronic batch record suite in six months, prioritizing a repeatable architecture. The solutions consisted of 42 process apps and 19 facility apps, built multilingual from the outset to position the suite for worldwide rollout, taking internal process definitions from scratch to validation-ready in the same window. By building on master data definitions with a highly composable structure, the team estimates that 50 to 70% of what they delivered in the first project scope can be reused in the next, and they can now forecast future deliveries with real accuracy. Alongside the applications, they defined a full methodology covering process assessment, iterative development, and local validation, and built internal knowledge management so standardized technical solutions are documented rather than remembered.

New this year, the AI Cultivator Award celebrates the people cutting through the AI hype to deliver real impact on the factory floor. Instead of chasing the technology for its own sake, these winners are working out, carefully and practically, where AI earns its place in frontline operations. They are helping define what AI looks like in manufacturing today, and what it should look like tomorrow.

Tiffany & Co. Tulip AI Agents Working Group

Tiffany & Co. formed its Tulip AI Agents Working Group to responsibly explore and scale practical AI solutions for manufacturing operations. Made up of process engineers and operational leaders from all four of Tiffany's internal manufacturing facilities, the group set out to turn operational data into actionable insights, surfacing trends, anomalies, and opportunities for improvement across the business. One pilot use case, the Production Performance Analyzer Agent, reviews operator, product, and department performance using Tulip production data and ERP standard times. The agent identifies performance variation, highlights training opportunities, and recommends areas for supervisor review. The solution is currently being piloted with select users as part of the group's broader evaluation of AI-enabled operational insights. Already in daily use on the manufacturing floor: AI-powered translation tools built into operator-facing applications, bridging language barriers for a multilingual workforce.

Eric Gruber, Tooling Maintenance Manager, VEKA

As Tooling Maintenance Manager at VEKA, Eric Gruber has turned his department's hardest-won knowledge into an AI agent his whole team can query. It began with a narrow tool he called the pounds calculator — a spreadsheet of extruder specifications, rebuilt as a Tulip AI Agent that could take the output of an extruded product, compare it against machine size and screw type, and determine whether the part running on that extruder was truly optimized. From there Eric built TAIRA, the Tooling AI Reporting Agent: a department-wide expert anyone in Tooling Maintenance can simply chat with, drawing on the original calculator, the data in their workspace, and years of tribal knowledge he has methodically standardized. What makes TAIRA scalable is the structure, a dedicated reference table and a written constitution governing how it operates, so the team can extend it without touching governance. Eric now plans to bring TAIRA into Extrusion Production, giving operators the same expertise during line startups.

The Trellis Award celebrates the partners who are with our customers every step of the way. A trellis provides the structure that lets growth reach higher, and these partners do the same by guiding, building, and supporting transformation from the first app to the global rollout. This year's winners show how a strong partner ecosystem turns the hardest parts of the work into the routine ones.

PwC

Over the past year, PwC has scaled a global team to support large, complex Tulip deployments in Pharmaceuticals, Medical Devices, Manufacturing, and Aerospace & Defense. This breadth matters because compliance obligations vary across those sectors, and PwC has built a practice equipped to meet these diverse requirements. They have strategically positioned field deployment engineers across multiple regions, ensuring customers have hands-on expertise close to their actual operations. Additionally, PwC is advancing AI capabilities within the practice, helping clients identify where agents and intelligent workflows fit within regulated environments. Beyond delivery, PwC brings real energy to the broader ecosystem through events, joint customer engagements, and pipeline development.

Frontwell Solutions

Frontwell Solutions became Tulip's first-ever Validation certified partner, a commitment that meant real investment from the team, and one they have carried well beyond the certification itself. Frontwell has supported accounts such as Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Halozyme, Curium, Corza Medical, Octapharma, Bayer, Eli Lilly, Ceva Santé Animale, and Cellares, implementing electronic batch records, electronic device history records, OEE, and digital logbooks in regulated environments where getting validation right is not optional. Most recently, the team successfully completed Phase 1 go-live with Opella, adding another impressive achievement to an already remarkable year.

Factorytalk

Factorytalk has been with Tulip since the very first GMP project, and eight years later they remain the most experienced partner in the ecosystem for electronic batch records and life sciences, working across a broad portfolio of customers in regulated manufacturing. At AstraZeneca, they support essentially the entire Tulip deployment, including 28 active production instances and more than 300 live solutions, spanning MES, Digital Changeover, Total Productive Maintenance, data integration, the award-winning Tulip Lifecycle Solution, and a vast range of Logbooks, Forms, and other solutions. Their design work is what makes that scale possible: thoughtful architecture in Factorytalk led Pilots enabled AstraZeneca to roll the Digital Changeover solution out to more than 130 packing lines in six months, using citizen developers and requiring minimal support from Factorytalk. They also built the Tulip Lifecycle Manager, now active across more than 14 countries, giving regulated customers centralized governance, digital validation, and automated traceability. With hundreds of validated solutions delivered across 25+ factories in 14 countries, Factorytalk is now piloting Tulip Agents inside a regulated framework.

Percall Group

With more than 20 Tulip-certified consultants across seven European countries, Percall Group is one of Tulip’s leading integration partners in Europe, supporting major manufacturing organizations in their digital transformation initiatives. Across Luxury, Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, and Industrial Manufacturing sectors, Percall Group combines deep industrial expertise with Tulip’s innovation platform to deliver measurable operational value. For several clients, Percall Group has developed a reusable library of configurable custom widgets focused on operator experience, quality management, supervision, and traceability, including visual defect scoring tools, advanced production dashboards, dynamic process plan editors, and ergonomic shopfloor interfaces.

From Proof of Value (PoV) to large-scale deployments, Percall Group supports manufacturers throughout their Tulip journey. At Saint-Gobain Sully, Tulip was deployed to digitize production supervision and manufacturing order declarations, improving traceability and operational efficiency. For a major automotive supplier, Percall Group successfully launched a Composable MES strategy, progressing from a PoV to a multi-site pilot, combining global standards with local site autonomy. Within Richemont Group, Percall Group supports GroupTech and several Maisons in their Tulip deployments, governance, adoption, and continuous improvement initiatives.