How to Achieve Better Traceability, Quality, and Efficiency with a Connected Factory Framework

If you’re like most manufacturers today, whether you’re in discrete manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, or medical devices, you probably face a common set of challenges:

• Paper-based and manual tracking of your production processes, plus siloed systems that make it hard to track work-in-process, components, materials, builds, and manage your operations more effectively.

• Manual inspections and quality management that leave you exposed to costly errors and dangerous compliance issues.

• Slow, cumbersome, and manual processes that keep your workforce from performing at its best.

This is why many manufacturers are working to solve these problems by automating data capture and connecting their people, machines, and data in real time. This way, you can achieve accurate, real-time visibility across your production operations, reduce quality issues and compliance risks, and orchestrate production operations far more efficiently and with better decision making.

At Tulip, one way we’re helping manufacturers do this is by implementing a Connected Factory Framework.

The Connected Factory Framework is a concept developed by Zebra, a global leader in data capture, sensor, and mobile workflow technologies for manufacturers—and one of our strategic partners

The framework consists of three key pillars that help manufacturers connect, automate, and streamline every area of their production, traceability, and quality management operations:

1. Actionable Visibility

Ultimately, you can’t manage, track, or improve what you can’t see, and many manufacturers are still struggle with manual tracking, paper-based processes, and blind spots.

When you don’t have good visibility or real-time, actionable intelligence in these areas, it’s extremely hard to know what you have on hand, what you’re producing, whether you’re on schedule and on-time, and make faster and better-informed decisions.

So, the first pillar of the Connected Factory Framework is actionable visibility. It focuses on implementing the right traceability, visibility, and automated data capture, so you can truly see everything that’s happening across your operations. This includes:

• Inventory and material movement

• Work in process on the shop floor

• Asset location and condition

• Operator performance and bottlenecks

2. Optimized Quality

Quality issues can damage your brand reputation, eat into your margins, and create compliance risks and potential fines. But many companies are still relying on manual inspections, quarantine, and quality management processes that are prone to missed defects, errors, and inefficiency that increase the likelihood of quality problems and costs.

So, our second pillar is all about optimizing quality, by digitizing inspections and integrating machine vision into your workflows, so you can:

• Automatically detect defects and exceptions with AI-powered vision sensors

• Track and trace parts, batches, and operators in real time

• Maintain digital records for audits and compliance

• Standardize and seamlessly execute corrective actions before defects escalate

3. Workforce Augmentation

Even though more and more of our production processes are automated, frontline teams are still the backbone of most manufacturing operations. But, in many cases, they lack the right digital and mobile tools, work instructions, cross-operational data, and inter-system connectivity to track, manage, and execute production, quality assurance, and traceability.

This is where the third pillar comes into play. Here, the best tools are modern, digital, and intuitive apps, workflows, and task management that you can put in the hands of your workers. This helps them do their jobs far more efficiently and effectively.

Typically, workforce augmentation involves:

• Real-time guidance, data and tools via mobile apps, devices, workflows

• Simplified and optimized digital processes to improve task and workflow efficiency

• Automated and mobile data capture to enable better frontline traceability

• Seamless connectivity and sharing between systems, workers, shifts and sites

Let’s look at how these three pillars can come to life in real-world operations and how we’ve helped companies put them into practice with our composable frontline operations platform and with Zebra’s traceability, data capture, and mobile computing technologies.

Use Case 1: Enhanced Shop Floor Visibility and Traceability

The Challenge: Manual data capture is time-consuming, error-prone, and often fragmented across multiple tools and systems.

The Solution: One relatively fast and easy way to close your traceability, data, and visibility gaps is to build out and deploy more automated data capture and reliable traceability with our platform’s no-code app building capabilities and Zebra’s AI-powered barcode scanning, RFID, and OCR document capture.

Using these tools, you can design automated and accurate data capture processes that help you capture the right data across all your manufacturing and quality processes and enable real-time traceability. You can then make this production data immediately visible to your workers, systems, and managers via Tulip apps and integration with your other business systems.

It’s relatively quick and simple to build the right apps or workflows with our app library, templates, and easy drag-and-drop workflow design and editing tools. You can quickly and easily design and configure the right data capture processes with built-in integration with Zebra’s barcoding, OCR and RFID technology to automatically scan, read, and parse the data you need.

Plus, we have data connectors and connectivity with virtually any other ERP system, WMS, or other manufacturing, inventory, or quality management system, so you can easily share data across your enterprise.

The Benefits:

• Faster, more automated and accurate data capture

• End-to-end traceability and visibility across your operations

• Real-time intelligence to drive better business decisions

• Full integration with your machines and business systems

• Streamlined workflows with instant data sharing and updates

Use Case 2: Streamlined Quality Control with Machine Vision

The Challenge: Manual inspections are manual, slow, inconsistent, and difficult to manage.

The Solution: One of the best ways you can improve and streamline your quality control is to use machine vision sensors to automatically perform visual inspections and detect defects, anomalies, and non-conformities in your components, materials, ingredients, subassemblies, assemblies, and your finished goods, pharma products, or medical devices.

At Tulip, we help companies do this by leveraging Zebra’s 2D and 3D machine vision sensors and cameras to perform automated inspections and capture and analyze images with AI and machine precision. Tulip’s Digital Workbench then provides real-time analytics and results to guides operators through corrective actions.

The Benefits:

• Automated, consistent defect detection

• Digital records for complete traceability

• Faster resolution of quality issues

• Reduced scrap and lower cost of non-quality

Use Case 3: Empowering Your Frontline with Communication and Task Coordination

The Challenge: Manual paperwork, processes, and fragmented data sharing and communication make it hard for workers to get tasks done and coordinate work effectively.

The Solution: We’ve already talked about the power of digitizing and optimizing your frontline workflows with mobile apps and digital tools that are designed for the work your teams need to get done. But one way to take your improvement a huge step further is by integrating your workforce communication tools and your mobile apps and interfaces, so your workers can seamlessly move from communication to task execution far more efficiently.

For example, you can use Zebra’s Workcloud Sync software with Tulip workflows and apps built for your needs, so workers can receive digital notifications and communications of tasks to complete, work-in-process updates, or coordination efforts, and automatically trigger the right corresponding Tulip app to access the workflows they need.

This dramatically cuts down on the time to find and launch the right apps or workflows, and it points them directly and contextually to the right interface and tasks to complete the next steps or the required work, complete with access to work instructions, data, transactions, or other information they need at their fingertips.

The Benefits:

• Simplified communication and task coordination

• Better orchestration of production and quality processes

• Streamlined and easily accessible task workflows-

• Smoother handoffs between teams and tasks

Use Case 4: Advanced Asset Visibility with RFID and Sensors

The Challenge: High-value assets, equipment, tooling, and sensitive goods are difficult to track and locate when they’re needed.

The Solution: Many manufacturers lose thousands of labor hours and sometimes even tens of thousands of dollars in equipment or tooling because they can’t track and locate assets quickly and effectively, but one powerful way to solve this problem is to use radio frequency identification (RFID).

By tagging high-value assets, equipment, tooling, or inventory with RFID tags or labels, you can use wireless RFID leaders to automatically detect, identify, and locate items remotely, to an accuracy of within a few feet. You can also tie individual RFIDs to virtually any asset data you maintain in your systems, so you can connect each ID to its real-time location, condition, availability, maintenance or inspection status, and much more.

Many of our manufacturing customers have used our platform alongside Zebra RFID technology to create real-time tracking and locating systems that put an end to time-consuming manual searches, save countless hours of time, and help them track assets with virtual pinpoint accuracy, even as items move from area to area or even building to building across their operations.

With Tulip apps and Zebra RFID, they can build configurable dashboards and workflows that help them quickly find anything they need and even get automated alerts when items are moved, reach the next production stage, or need specific work, inspection, routine maintenance, and more.

The Benefits:

• Real-time asset traceability and monitoring

• Fast and easy asset location without manual searches

• Proactive alerts for WIP, condition thresholds, inspection, etc.

• Reduced risk of loss or damage

• Improved compliance with regulatory standards

The Zebra Connected Factory Framework is designed to spark fresh ideas on boosting visibility, quality, and efficiency in your operations. Use it as a roadmap as you plan your next steps and chart a course for real improvement.

At Tulip, we don’t just talk strategy—we help you put it into action. Our no-code app development platform, combined with Zebra’s Connected Factory Framework, makes it easier than ever to move from theory to impact and accelerate your path to measurable results.

Ready to see what’s possible? Book a demo today and discover how Tulip and Zebra can help you transform your factory and hit your goals faster.