Shaping the Future of Frontline Operations at Operations Calling 2024

Operations Calling was born from our belief that conferences should be spaces where real-world connections are made, inspiration and practical solutions meet, and where the people who are hands-on with digital transformation come together to share, learn, and grow. This year’s event wasn’t your typical SaaS conference, where the focus is often on polished slide decks and marketing messages. Instead, Operations Calling was about creating an interactive experience, a space where hands-on exploration and genuine conversation could thrive.

Over the course of the episode, three central concepts of the event emerged: the importance of building an ecosystem, the value of open dialog and knowledge-sharing across the community, and the growing impact of composability on frontline operations.

A core pillar of our vision at Tulip, and a key focus at Operations Calling, is building an open ecosystem that enables the integration of solutions from a wide range of vendors together into a seamless tech stack. No single vendor can provide solutions for every problem in your operations, and collaborating with key players across the industry, like Hexagon, PTC, Snowflake, Sartorius, Rockwell Automation, and more, is critical to enabling citizen developers to architect the tech stacks they need. All in all, 28 different tech partners were represented throughout Operations Calling.

At the event, the Partner Pavilion was a clear reflection of this vision. Rather than traditional booth setups with siloed demos and monotonous slideware, the Partner Pavilion was a collaborative area where you could see in real time how solutions from a wide range of vendors integrate with Tulip and each other. This emphasis on Ecosystem integrations and a “show don’t tell” approach extended to other focal points of the event, including the Tulip Experience Center (TEC) as well as the Pop-Up Factory. Instead of just providing a high-level “art of the possible,” we showed what’s achievable and how to do it with hands-on demos and experiences, giving attendees the opportunity to explore these solutions at a deep level. This format allowed attendees to see how solutions can work together and ask questions directly—going beyond abstract concepts and proving how solutions from across the Ecosystem can work together to solve real operational problems.

Manufacturers have historically kept their challenges close to the chest and have been hesitant to share the best practices that give their company a competitive edge. At Operations Calling, our goal was to change that by fostering a culture of openness and knowledge-sharing.

Throughout the conference, we structured panels, Q&A sessions, and workshops to encourage this kind of openness, enabling attendees to share the ups and downs of their digital transformation journeys, rather than just the end result. Attendees and speakers discussed everything from the nuances of scaling a new process to handling unexpected issues that arose along the way. This honest, unfiltered sharing isn’t something you see often at manufacturing events. But in order to push the industry forward, it is critically important to create these spaces where people feel comfortable talking about both their wins and their challenges.

Also key in helping cultivate this sense of community were the Groundbreakers Awards, which recognized the people on the frontlines who are hands-on with digital transformation day in and day out, helping drive transformative change through their use of Tulip. Awards fell into two categories. First were the Golden Shovel awards: recognizing individuals who went above and beyond, leveraging Tulip and their app-building expertise in creative and interesting ways to solve problems, and provide tangible value in their organization. Second were the Greenhouse awards: recognizing manufacturing sites or companies who are empowering their team with digital tools in the spirit of growth and continuous improvement.

This platform allowed all attendees to hear the success stories and challenges faced by other companies, providing both inspiration and valuable insights. The interactions that stemmed from it led to new relationships and mentorships, further strengthening the community and fostering a sense of shared purpose in advancing frontline operations.

At Operations Calling, composability was more than just a buzzword. This philosophy is at the core of how we think about building solutions for frontline operations. The approach is simple but transformative: build modular, agile production systems that citizen developers can tailor to their needs as operational requirements change, all without being tied to a rigid architecture. At the event, we followed up the release of our Composable MES for discrete manufacturing earlier this year with the official launch of a Composable MES for the pharmaceutical industry, providing regulated manufacturers with a flexible solution that can be rapidly configured to meet the unique needs of their operations.

The emphasis on composability went far beyond our own product launches, however. The impact that this approach has on frontline operations was front and center in Daniele Iacovelli’s keynote speech that kicked off the event, as he described how Roche’s rapid pace of innovation necessitated a new approach to building digital solutions. In such a dynamic operational context, having to spend months (if not years) developing, customizing, and validating the vast codebases of monolithic software solutions is simply untenable. Instead of this legacy approach, Roche adopted has embraced a composable architecture, allowing them to quickly build modular solutions to rapidly solve problems in operations as they arise.

The revamped Tulip Experience Center (TEC) that we debuted at the event was also built around a composable architecture. Rather than having a single monolithic solution deployed across all the different workstations, each was running an app that had been specifically designed for the task being carried out at that station. All the apps were built on a Common Data Model which enabled them to seamlessly interact and share data such as inventory, work orders, genealogy records, and more. This composable architecture meant that each individual app could be updated at will without impacting all the other workstations, allowing citizen developers to make improvements in an agile manner and enabling a much faster time to value than would be possible with traditional monolithic platforms.

All across the event, examples like these emerged as clear evidence of the value that composability can deliver to frontline operations. Being able to quickly iterate on modular solutions and integrate across the industrial tech stack to create something truly impactful in just a matter of weeks is exactly the kind of capability that frontline operations needs.

These three themes—building an open ecosystem, fostering open dialogue across the community, and leveraging the power of composability—were key to making this year’s Operations Calling a truly unique experience. The energy, insights, and collaborations we saw all throughout the event only reinforced our belief in these principles, and left us more inspired than ever to continue growing and strengthening the frontline operations community.