Why I joined Tulip, Or, Why I Chose Tulip Over MES - Florian Grabow

I have been in the MES space for the past twelve years – I was very happy and worked with some of the largest Pharma organizations in the world.

I came across Tulip after a customer recommended that I take a look at their company and offering. Once understanding Tulip’s mission, I realized that this is what I believe manufacturers around the globe need to digitize their manufacturing processes.

In this blog post I will try to explain my thoughts behind this move and to give some insights on how I believe the future of software in production will look like.

Digitalization is everywhere. I will not go into what digitalization is in detail, but in short it is a huge change management exercise in production. In very easy words the target of this change is to get 100% visibility into the activities and their status going on on the shop floor. The hope is that this data can be used to do “smart” things. A prerequisite is of course that everything that produces data is somehow connected. One important aspect of this is the so called data centric approach.

Coming from an MES point of view the answer here is clear. Deploy MES everywhere and connect everything necessary. Of course this is possible and has been done many times in the past. But the world has changed in the last few years. Questions about cloud, faster deployments and quicker return on investment got louder and louder.

On 16th March I joined Tulip. They have answers to a lot of the challenges of my past:

• Native Cloud
• Super fast deployments with value creation from minute one
• Build for incremental deployments
• Only Opex almost no Capex
• No customizations due to no code Apps
• Apps build exactly for each work place by the customers themselves
• Interfaces via Adapters
• Ready for GMP & CFR 21 Part 11
• Commonly used App library for best practice processes on the shop floor

Tulip is clearly not an MES, but it is definitely one of the answers to digitalization and at the same time fulfills MES like functions. Multiple small Apps for each and every workplace tailored exactly to what is required at the corresponding workstation. In the background a super easy to use data evaluation functionality which can create reports for almost everything and smart no code integration of IoT and other devices.

So in summary, why did I join Tulip? I strongly believe that the way Tulip is doing “things” is the future for software in production. True Software as a Service on the shop floor ready today and also ready for the regulated industry.