Groundbreakers

Golden Shovel Award
Recognizing expert builders who make an impact on their business.
Greenhouse Award
Recognizing teams achieving goals through continuous transformation.
AI Cultivator Award
Recognizing individuals and teams championing AI at their organization.
Trellis Award
Recognizing Tulip partners supporting customer implementation.

Meet the 2026 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 US.

Read about the winners

The 2026 Golden Shovel Award Winners

Recognizing individuals who have become expert builders, leveraging their solution building skills and the Tulip platform to make an impact on their business.

Mollie Serbin

Manager, Digital Manufacturing Platforms,
Haemonetics

Took an eDHR application suite from proof of concept to production release in six weeks, cutting the paper DHR correction rate from 56% to near zero.
Delivered a 140-160% output increase, a 50% reduction in operator training time, and near-elimination of GDP errors through the centrifuge repair eDHR.
Now leading a simultaneous eDHR rollout across six global sites while mentoring new builders and standing up a Center of Excellence model.

The 2026 Greenhouse Award Winners

Recognizing an entire team, site, or company for leveraging Tulip to achieve production goals and drive continuous transformation.

Built a full-scale digital manufacturing solution spanning Manufacturing Operations, New Product Integration, Production Management, and Craft Upskilling, replacing manual instructions and paper records.
Adopted a composable approach from the start, including standardized templates, shared components, and common data structures, enabling rapid scaling across processes, product lines, and departments.
Fostered citizen development across operators, technicians, engineers, and business users, turning a single solution into a scalable digital ecosystem and repeatable framework for the organization.

The 2026 AI Cultivator Award Winners

Recognizing individuals and teams who are championing AI and watering the seeds of innovation across their organization.

Eric Gruber

Tooling Maintenance Manager,
VEKA

Built TAIRA, the Tooling AI Reporting Agent, a department-wide expert anyone in Tooling Maintenance can chat with, grown from a single "pounds calculator" agent.
Created a governed, reusable AI agent framework with its own reference table and written "constitution," so the team can extend TAIRA without touching governance.
Standardized years of institutional knowledge into a shared resource, with plans to expand TAIRA into Extrusion Production to support operators during line startups.

The 2026 Trellis Award Winners

Recognizing a Tulip partner who has successfully supported a customer's journey with Tulip through implementation or scale up.

Built a practice spanning regulated industries, from a global pharmaceutical manufacturer’s worldwide Tulip program to complex aerospace and defense operations.
Positioned field deployment engineers across multiple regions, placing hands-on Tulip expertise close to customers’ operations.
Advanced AI capabilities within their Tulip practice while investing deeply in the wider ecosystem through events, joint engagements, and pipeline development.