Golden Shovel Spotlight

At Pratt Miller Engineering, an Oshkosh Corporation business, a company known for its cutting-edge engineering solutions in the motorsports, defense, and mobility industries, the pace is relentless. In an environment built on rapid prototyping and innovation, there’s no time for inefficient, paper-based processes. This is the challenge that John Boyle, Senior Manager of Manufacturing Operations and winner of the 2025 Tulip Golden Shovel Award, has tackled head-on.

With a background in mechanical engineering and years of experience as a process engineer programming PLCs, John has championed digital transformation across Pratt Miller Engineering, evolving Tulip into the company's primary Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and fundamentally changing the way work gets done. What started as a tool for digital work instructions has become the operational backbone of the company, with John’s vision and relentless drive playing a key role.

When John first joined Pratt Miller, he was tasked with a critical challenge: bringing digital work instructions to a defense project that was entirely paper-based. The company’s existing software was too limited. "You could put some pictures, you could put some bullet points, and that was pretty much it," he explains. Most importantly, it lacked the robust data validation capabilities required for a government contract that demanded absolute accuracy.

In 2018, after company leaders saw Tulip at a trade show, John ordered a Factory Kit to explore its potential. He built a mobile assembly workstation and developed a proof-of-concept application to demonstrate the platform's power. "I just made an app that would incorporate all the sensors as a demo," he recalls. This was a simulation of a real work instruction for a small product, rapidly integrating sensors and pick-to-light into the solution. He went from unboxing the kit to having a fully functional demo in about a month. He then presented this solution to over a hundred people — from internal teams to external customers — showcasing a new, more dynamic way of working and proving the platform's value. The experience of building it was a revelation.

John quickly moved from demos to deploying a suite of apps with massive organizational impact. Across 7 years of working with Tulip, the project he’s most proud of is the transformation of Pratt Miller Engineering’s work order request process. Before, the company had relied on a SharePoint form that had become a major bottleneck. Originally built when only a handful of people submitted requests, the system wasn't robust enough to scale alongside Pratt Miller’s growing operations.

As the company evaluated several options, from off-the-shelf software to a custom solution built by IT, John started developing an alternative in Tulip. His user-centric, intuitive solution won out over the competition. "Now everyone in the company uses Tulip as their work order request system," he says. "It tracks every single request for basically parts or labor to be produced across the company."

John has also single-handedly driven the development of critical applications for inventory management, quality inspection documentation, and a supplier quality database, touching nearly every facet of Pratt Miller’s operations. Within the Motorsports division alone, Tulip now supports everything from raw material procurement and manufacturing planning to managing part transactions with customers at race events.

Beyond critical MES applications, John also leverages Tulip for quick, agile problem-solving. When a custom-supplied component was found to be faulty, his team needed a reliable way to track the rework and testing process. John quickly built a temporary app that provided a clean, user-friendly interface and allowed technicians to capture readings directly from a digital multimeter via an Edge IO. Most importantly, it created a robust digital record that could be linked to a specific vehicle build if needed later for traceability. "It was a one-time use app," he says. "We used it for two weeks and that was it."

For any digital solution to succeed, it needs buy-in from the people who use it every day. “You know, you can make the coolest app ever, but if the operators don't like it or if they don’t see the value, it doesn’t matter." At Pratt Miller Engineering, the toughest audience was the shop floor assembly technicians, a group accustomed to working fast and sticking to what they know. "We're prototyping all the time, you know, doing work with race cars, so we always have to do things very quickly," John notes.

John knew he couldn’t drive change from an office. He went to the floor, sat with the technicians, and listened. Tulip’s agility became his greatest asset. When a user pointed out an issue, he could fix it on the spot. "They would look at a work instruction and say, 'Hey, this picture's wrong,' and you know, we could take a picture right there, upload it, and they see the change immediately," he explains. This iterative, collaborative approach slowly built trust.

"After about a year, people finally started asking for it all the time,” John says. “It’s been a complete mindset shift. Before people were like, hey, where's my print? Now it's like, hey, where's my Tulip?”

As Tulip’s footprint grew, so did the demand for new apps. John went from being the sole builder to the leader of a thriving team of citizen developers. He mentors a team of three engineers and has empowered a steady stream of interns to become heavy Tulip users. One recent intern built a powerful solution for serial number capture as the quantity of them skyrocketed. "Our intern came in over the summer and was able to totally revamp our approach,” John said.

John also supports engineers from other teams, supporting them in building small, targeted apps for their own needs, like issue trackers. The common thread? "Most of these people, you know, similar to me, don't have any actual development experience," he says. By empowering his colleagues, John has created a sustainable culture of continuous improvement.

Ultimately, John's success comes down to a simple formula: combining powerful tools with a people-centric approach. For those starting their own journey with Tulip, he emphasizes the importance of tapping into the collective knowledge of the user community. He credits resources like the Tulip Knowledge Base and Community forums as being instrumental in his own development, providing a space to learn new skills and find proven solutions from others who have walked the same path.