Starting from Scratch
With micro-mobility growing in cities across the world as walkability improves, the team at Piaggio Fast Forward ™ (PFF) noticed an opportunity. The gita robot, a two-wheeled, semi-autonomous robot came to life, with its iconic shape and unique ability to simply and easily follow a walking user and carry their belongings. As PFF moved gita from a prototype to a production system, they needed to build their processes from the ground up. Choosing Tulip over a traditional MES enabled the team to scale and grow digital solutions on their own and deploy new apps across their operation.
Integrating Tulip apps into their assembly line as they built it, PFF laid the groundwork for the integral data collection while being able to deploy simple work instructions to ensure quality standards in their new production process.
A Complex New Product
As they moved from prototype to production, PFF identified needs and requirements for their operation. First, they needed repeatable, digital instructions and training material for operators. Newly brought-on operators would be assembling a uniquely complex product, each gita has 150 unique parts, and making sure operators know what they are doing at every step of the way is crucial for having a consistent product at the end of the line.
With Tulip, PFF could train people at each stage of assembly and subassembly, and provide them with up-to-date instructions on exactly what they are working on. Speeding up training helped ramp production even faster.
“[Operators] have every part and step in there. So with Tulip, you make less errors.” - Ha Nguyen, Lead Assembler, Piaggio Fast Forward
With Tulip’s no-code platform, the team can easily and quickly update the solution to reflect new instructions or changes to production.
“As we get changes in the operations, Tulip allows us to adjust and adapt to that and then ensure that every product beyond that change is made the same and we can trace that all the way through the system.”
Brian Davis
Chief Operating Officer, Piaggio Fast Forward
Baseline Data
In addition to the instructions and training material, PFF wanted to be able to collect data at every step of the way. Knowing cycle times, flow rates, takt times, and defect counts would set the baseline for how their production line changes and grows. This data was crucial for making educated decisions, rather than gut reactions that could impact their success or slow their production ramp-up of the gita robot.
“Tulip really helped us set up the baseline for the data, and being a newer manufacturing facility really helped us start on the right foot instead of trying to figure it out after roles were established and tribal knowledge had really started running.”
Katrina Weiss
Senior Director of Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Piaggio Fast Forward
Analyzing and sharing data across their organization is crucial to everything the PFF team does. With the Tulip platform, data can be generated, used, and traced through their entire operation, at every step of the process. Tulip leverages the scalability and agility of the AWS cloud to support PFF.
Conclusion
In today’s production environment, it is important to react quickly to changes and to be able to back up decisions with supporting analysis. Tulip helps the team at PFF build gita in a repeatable manufacturing process and track data on all of their steps. Defects and runtime issues can be identified and solved quickly, enabling them to deliver a better product in the end.
Piaggio Fast Forward is already taking the lessons they’ve learned from their production data and applying it to new products they’re introducing. As they continue to scale and grow their operation, Tulip will offer them the flexibility they need to deliver quality robots to consumers.
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