Tips for Streamlining Discrete Operations: Why a System of Record Alone isn’t Enough

For many discrete manufacturers, there is a painful disconnect between the software that runs the business and the reality of the shop floor.

When organizations invest in "top-rated" enterprise software — typically MES and ERP systems like SAP, Oracle, or NetSuite — they are prioritizing financial visibility, supply chain planning, and inventory reconciliation. These systems are excellent at managing the Bill of Materials (BOM) and forecasting demand.

However, they are often invisible to the operator holding the wrench.

While these legacy systems generally do a good job of telling you what to build, they lack the granularity to guide how it is built. This creates a hidden factory where the official system keeps track of inventory, but the actual assembly process is run on spreadsheets, paper travelers, and tribal knowledge.

For high-mix/low-volume (HMLV) manufacturers, this gap between the office and the production line is where efficiency, quality, and traceability are lost.

The primary reason standard tech stacks fail in discrete environments is that they treat assembly like a machine-driven process. In process industries, the machine is the primary variable. In discrete manufacturing, the human is the primary variable.

This distinction is becoming more critical as the market shifts toward mass customization. Whether building medical devices or configurable electronics, manufacturers are under increasingly immense pressure to deliver personalized products at mass-production speeds.

The Operational Consequence

In this environment, standard work changes daily. A legacy MES designed for static production lines cannot keep up. When a new variant is introduced, updating a rigid system often takes months of coding and validation. By the time the software is updated, the product design has arguably changed again.

Because operators are the active agents — making decisions, selecting tools, and verifying quality on every unit — the software must be human-centric. It must actively guide the operator through complex, ever-changing workflows in real-time, rather than just logging what they did after the shift ends.

To streamline operations, leaders must distinguish between the two essential functions of traditional manufacturing systems: Planning and Execution.

Many companies assume the software that handles their planning (ERP) can also handle their execution. It cannot. This leaves a gap that must be filled. The critical strategic choice for discrete manufacturers is how to fill that gap: with a rigid, monolithic MES, or a flexible Composable approach.

1. The Planning Layer (ERP)

The Question it Answers: What should we build?

The ERP is the financial heartbeat of the organization. It manages orders, inventory levels, financials, and the master BOM. It is typically the source of truth for the business. However, ERPs stop at the office door. They create the plan but generally have no mechanism to guide the operator or ensure the plan is executed correctly.

2. The Execution Layer: Monolithic vs. Composable

The Question it Answers: How do we build it?

This is where the shift is happening. Historically, manufacturers relied on Legacy MES. Today, the industry is shifting toward a composable approach enabled by Frontline Operations Platforms like Tulip.

The Old Way: Legacy MES platforms are typically considered monolithic. While they often contain various modules (quality, scheduling, genealogy), these components are implemented in a way that is tightly coupled. You cannot easily modify one part of the system without impacting the others.

While sufficient for static, high-volume standardization, this architecture is famously rigid. Customizing a workflow often requires expensive scripting, vendor change requests, and extensive regression testing. In high-mix/low-volume environments, this rigidity becomes a significant bottleneck.

The New Way: A Frontline Operations Platform takes a fundamentally different approach. It is built on a composable architecture. Instead of buying a rigid suite of features, a composable architecture allows you to build operations from small, modular, and interoperable applications. Because the platform separates the data model from the user interface, engineers can build a digital work instruction or a quality check app without writing code or disrupting the core system.

One of the distinct advantages of implementing a solution built on a composable architecture is that it does not require a "rip and replace" strategy.

Because legacy MES is monolithic, implementing it usually means throwing out everything that came before. With a flexible platform, manufacturers have options:

1. Wrap and Extend: Keep the Legacy MES for regulatory record-keeping, but "wrap" it with agile apps that guide the operators and send data back to the MES.

2. Fill the Gaps: Deploy apps only for processes the ERP/MES misses, like manual kitting, rework, or specialized sub-assemblies.

3. Full Replacement: Over time, expand the ecosystem of apps until they cover all production requirements, creating a complete Composable MES.

One critical aspect often missing from software conversations is the reality of the workforce. Discrete manufacturing is currently facing a massive labor shortage and high turnover rates.

In a traditional setup relying on ERP printouts or rigid MES screens, onboarding a new operator is a slow, painful process. The knowledge of how to assemble the product often lives in the head of a senior operator. When that senior operator leaves, the knowledge leaves with them.

A Frontline Operations Platform acts as a digital mentor by encoding expert knowledge into intuitive, media-rich apps (videos, GIFs, guided workflows), manufacturers can:

1. Reduce Training Time: New hires can produce value on Day 1 because the app guides them step-by-step.
   

2. Standardize Quality: The process is no longer dependent on who is working the shift. The app ensures the "best way" is the only way.

3. Capture Tribal Knowledge: When a process is improved, that improvement is pushed to every station instantly, rather than waiting for a training seminar.

Legacy systems rely on waterfall deployments — long, expensive projects that assume processes won't change. But in a high-mix shop floor, engineering changes happen daily. When the software cannot keep up with the product design, operators are forced to rely on paper printouts and improvisation.

This is where errors occur.

A Frontline Operations Platform solves this by allowing engineers to update workflows in minutes, not months. Unlike a traditional MES that requires a developer to modify code, a frontline platform gives process engineers the tools to modify apps directly. This agility is an operational necessity for keeping work instructions synchronized with engineering releases.

Three Discrete Use Cases That Demand Agility

When it comes to identifying high-value use cases in a discrete assembly environment, we often see manufacturers achieve quick wins in the following areas:

1. Complex Manual Assembly (Error-Proofing)

With manual assembly, quality depends on the operator following the right sequence every time. Digital work instructions replace static PDFs with interactive, step-by-step apps. These apps can automatically verify that a step is complete — for example, by reading a value from a connected digital caliper — before allowing the operator to proceed. This is true Poka-Yoke (mistake-proofing) at the software level.

2. Genealogy & Traceability (Compliance)

For regulated industries like medtech and aerospace and defense, knowing that a product was built isn't enough. You need the specific history of that unit. A frontline platform provides granular traceability, recording the serial number of every sub-assembly and the exact torque data of every critical screw. This creates a digital history record for every unit, automated directly from the operator's actions rather than post-shift paperwork. This capability is essential for GxP validation and audit readiness.

3. Kitting and Custom Orders

With high product variance comes high kitting complexity. Frontline apps can guide operators through the kitting process using visual cues and pick-to-light integrations, ensuring the right parts make it into the right box for custom orders before assembly even begins.

AI’s potential in manufacturing is real — but most companies struggle to deploy it on the shop floor. The barrier isn’t a lack of data. It’s the rigidity of legacy systems.

Traditional MES platforms are built on closed architectures. If a team wants to integrate a vision model for quality inspection or use a large language model to summarize maintenance logs, they often face high vendor costs, long timelines, and brittle workarounds. These systems weren’t designed to accommodate rapid innovation.

A frontline operations platform changes that dynamic.

A Flexible Foundation for Intelligent Work

Tulip’s open, composable architecture is built to support evolving technologies like AI — without the need to re-platform or hard-code integrations.

• Agnostic Integration: Models evolve quickly. With Tulip’s connector framework, manufacturers can plug in new AI tools (vision, analytics, agents) and iterate freely — without disrupting production.
  
  

• Contextual Data: The value of AI depends on context. Tulip captures structured data at the point of use — who performed what task, where, and when. This enables AI models to generate meaningful insights grounded in real operational activity, not static documents.

Manufacturers are already putting this into action:

• With AI Composer, teams turn SOPs into apps in minutes.
  

• Computer Vision verifies steps, catches defects, and guides picking — improving inspection and preventing errors before they reach customers.
  

• Composable Agents can automate routine frontline tasks, like flagging anomalies or assisting in handoffs.

These capabilities are part of Tulip’s AI-powered solutions — designed to embed intelligence directly into frontline workflows, helping manufacturers act faster with insight, context, and control.

Finally, discrete manufacturing is physical. Streamlining requires closing the gap between digital intent and physical action.

Legacy ERP and MES are often "air-gapped" from the tools operators use. In contrast, a Frontline Operations Platform is built for seamless connectivity, meaning it can integrate directly with am ecosystem of IoT devices including smart torque tools, scales, cameras, and sensors.

This helps to eliminate error associated with manual production, while also logging data generated at every step from start to finish. For example:

• Legacy Way: Operator reads a torque spec on a paper printout. They manually set their wrench. They tighten the bolt. They write "OK" on a clipboard.

• Frontline Way: The app reads the barcode of the unit. It automatically sends the correct torque program to the smart tool. The tool tightens the bolt and reports the exact torque value back to the app. The app automatically advances to the next step.

Streamlining the shop floor means removing the friction between the engineer’s intent and the operator’s action. It means faster changeovers, error-proofed assembly steps, and a workforce that can adapt to new product variants on day one.

To achieve this, manufacturers must recognize that while an ERP is necessary for the business, it is insufficient for the build. To close the execution gap, leaders need to adopt a platform purpose-built for the agility and human-centricity of the discrete shop floor.

If you’re interested in learning how Tulip can help bridge the gap between your back-end systems and frontline processes, reach out to a member of our team today!