Meet the 2025 Groundbreaker Winners
Every year, the Groundbreaker Awards celebrate the heart of the Tulip community: the builders, innovators, and leaders who are making a difference at their organizations. Winners are announced in a special celebration at Operations Calling.
The 2025 Golden Shovel Award Winners
Mario Ríos
Site Operational Technology Lead, Smith+Nephew
- Developed an end-to-end work order tracking system in just three weeks, which provided real-time operational visibility that slashed work-in-progress inventory.
- Achieved a 70% reduction in finished goods inventory and a 33% reduction in warehouse space by implementing a Tulip-based package-to-export system.
- Launched a citizen developer community to scale innovation and coached colleagues from the shop floor to build their own digital solutions.
John Boyle
Senior Manager, Manufacturing Operations, Pratt Miller Engineering
- Led the evolution of Tulip into the company's primary Manufacturing Execution System (MES), which transformed everything from raw material procurement to race-day customer transactions.
- Replaced a bottlenecked work order request system with an intuitive Tulip application that became the standard for the entire company.
- Fostered widespread user adoption by working directly with shop floor technicians, iteratively improving apps based on their immediate feedback and building a culture of digital empowerment.
Zachary Kreiley
Continuous Improvement Engineer, Stanley Black & Decker
- Automated his site's production scheduling by building a powerful integration between SAP and Tulip, saving up to 20 hours of manual data entry per week.
- Invented a completely hands-off digital Kanban system that analyzed schedules and automatically triggered replenishment jobs, eliminating stockouts and manual tracking.
- Developed a series of Production Tracking apps for 5 manufacturing areas, each one tailored to the unique workflows of the departments, creating a single source of truth for factory-wide production status and enhancing team collaboration.
Darren O'Neil
Industrial Engineering Manager, Test Devices by SCHENCK
- Digitized the company's entire core manufacturing process, moving it from paper travelers and binders to a comprehensive, end-to-end digital system.
- Created an all-in-one calibrated tool management application that centralized data, automated service warnings, and error-proofed tool selection in real-time.
- Ignited a cultural shift toward citizen development, turning frontline feedback and initial skepticism into a company-wide builder's mindset.
Albert Winsman
Staff User Experience Designer, Cellares
- Developed a comprehensive app suite for process review and Electronic Batch Record (eBR) generation, providing real-time visibility and full traceability for every batch.
- Established a consistent design language across Tulip apps and proprietary cell therapy manufacturing equipment, creating a unified and intuitive operator experience.
- Collaborated across manufacturing and quality teams, building compliant digital solutions that help accelerate the delivery of cutting-edge cell therapies.
The 2025 Greenhouse Award Winners
AstraZeneca
Digital Changeovers Team
- Spearheaded a major digital transformation by scaling a new digital changeover solution from a single pilot to 17 sites and over 100 packing lines in just three months.
- Achieved significant operational improvements, with engagement from production teams driving a 29% reduction in average changeover time and 50% reduction in variability on one production line.
- Fostered an organizational transformation by empowering frontline operators and building a powerful culture of user-centric design and in-house innovation.
Avon Technologies
- Stood up two new, complex, highly-regulated production lines in under six months, meeting all strict data genealogy and traceability requirements from day one.
- Leveraged Tulip to orchestrate production and quality, enabling close collaboration between engineering, production, and IT to meet business goals.
- Supercharged Lean manufacturing with a composable approach, empowering teams to achieve true agility and address evolving customer requirements.
Innovafeed
- Achieved a monumental 500% increase in production at the world's largest insect farm by empowering their team with a flexible Manufacturing Execution System (MES).
- Cultivated a "try first" culture of rapid experimentation and feedback, enabling them to collaboratively solve complex challenges and build solutions adapted to their unique processes.
- Expanded the impact of their operational success beyond the shop floor, providing data that fuels business intelligence and supports commercial teams across the organization.
BD (Becton Dickinson)
- Established a scalable Center of Excellence model to successfully deploy Tulip across 10+ global sites, creating a repeatable framework that empowers citizen development.
- Fostered a culture of bottom-up innovation by enabling shop-floor associates to contribute ideas that are rapidly developed and deployed as Tulip apps.
- Modernized their tech infrastructure by integrating Tulip with multiple databases, SAP, and other software tools to digitize paper-based workflows.
The 2025 Trellis Award Winners
Accenture
- Guided global manufacturers through strategic shifts to modern, composable MES platforms, driving enterprise agility and value.
- Architected scalable blueprints for deploying Tulip across global enterprises, establishing best practices for standardized, reusable solutions and cloud-native integration.
- Championed citizen development to empower client teams with the autonomy to build their own applications, fostering cultures of continuous improvement and self-sufficiency.
PCG
- Leveraged the Tulip platform to accelerate manufacturers’ digital transformation journey, unlocking smarter operations and rapid time-to-value at lower cost.
- Built “SmartFactory,” a digital manufacturing solution powered by Tulip, enabling manufacturers to seamlessly connect manufacturing processes, data, execution and more to ERP systems.
- Employed a hands-on, operator-first methodology, co-creating solutions with frontline teams to ensure rapid adoption and solve real-world production challenges.
Previous Groundbreaker Winners
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2024 Groundbreakers
Hivzo Cehajic, Novo Nordisk
Ryan Infantozzi, Veka
Esmeralda Gonzalez, Stanley Black & Decker
Steve Midcalf, Generac
Daniel Ferrow, Stanley Black & Decker
AstraZeneca's Tulip Lifecycle Solution Team
Bloom Energy
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2023 Groundbreakers
Salim Jasarevic, IAC Group
Nicolette Naya, Tiffany & Co.
Leo Oh, Milwaukee Tool
Will Schlecter, BOXABL
Pascal Wirths, DMG MORI
Plug Power
SBD Hermosillo
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2022 Groundbreakers
Hira Ahmad, Form Energy
Eric Byers, Piaggio Fast Forward
Zeke Laws, Stanley Black and Decker
Outset Medical
Ultra Clean Technology
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You may submit as many nominations as you would like! Just submit a new form response for each nomination.
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Absolutely!
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Yes! There were many great submissions last year and it was difficult to select who would win. Please feel free to re-submit and add more detail to reflect their hard work and success from the last year.
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Yes, but we will be giving priority to those who have not already been recognized. However, it is possible that a past winner can win again for the other category, or if there has been a significant development in the last year that justifies another win!
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The winners will be announced onstage at Operations Calling 2026 (either in Boston, MA October 5-7 or in Lyon, France Nov 2-4, 2026). We will also celebrate our winners with spotlights on our socials, the website, and Tulip Community!
Nominate a Groundbreaker Today!
Nominate yourself or a peer by July 18 to shine a light on their impact with Tulip.