Golden Shovel Spotlight

For Mario Ríos, Operational Technology Lead at Smith+Nephew, the goal isn’t just to implement new digital tools. It’s to serve as a “bridge” between the people on the shop floor and the technology that can make their lives easier. Based in Costa Rica, Mario leads a team of OT engineers, providing technical and strategic guidance across multiple manufacturing sites.

With a background in mechatronics engineering, Mario has always been a builder. During his eight years at Smith+Nephew, he has moved through various roles, from sustaining engineering to working with the PLCs and HMIs of complex chemical manufacturing processes. His journey with Tulip began four years ago when he joined a newly formed digitization organization. He was introduced to Tulip and immediately saw its potential for the Costa Rica site. Mario recognized that it was a tool that could empower not just the operators on the floor, but also developers like himself who wanted to rapidly build and deploy transformative solutions.

Tackling an ambitious first project after only a month of using the platform, Mario built a scrap tracking application for the clean room. The project was a quality-driven initiative, built on a foundational partnership with the Quality department. This close collaboration was critical, providing the sponsorship and deep process knowledge necessary for success. Mario also worked closely with the operators to learn all of the nuances and intricacies of the process. The app showed an impact within days. For Mario, this was a pivotal moment, solidifying his vision of how no-code tools could empower both operators and developers by rapidly digitizing processes and providing real-time data.

Armed with this new perspective, Mario effectively won over allies, despite initial skepticism. “They were telling me, ‘Okay, this is just the flavor of the month,’” he says of the operators and supervisors who had seen other initiatives come and go. His strategy was to build trust by demonstrating value, one use case at a time. By solving real pain points on the shop floor, he turned skeptics into advocates. “Once they saw the benefits, they started reaching out with ideas,” Mario notes. “Now I always joke around like, I will probably retire and we won't be even half done by then…there’s so much we can do!”

That growing trust led to his biggest challenge yet. At the end of 2022, the site identified a key opportunity to enhance its real-time operational visibility. While the ERP served as the system of record, the time lag between a work order’s physical progress and its digital update presented an opportunity for optimization. Improving this could help streamline deliveries and reduce work-in-progress inventory. The site lead gave him a clear and urgent directive: “I just need to know where my work orders are.” Mario and a small team of citizen developers had just three weeks to deliver a solution.

Mario’s approach was to build backwards from a previous success, a package-to-export system he had implemented with Tulip that optimized the shipment of packaged inventory to sterilization. That system had already delivered significant results, including a 70% reduction in finished goods inventory and a 33% reduction in warehouse space.

Using this as a foundation, Mario got to work building a comprehensive, end-to-end tracking system that uses Tulip for data capture and PowerBI for reporting. “The first version that we built did not have a pretty user interface,” he admits, “but it worked. It captured the data that was needed, and that’s when I saw the real value of low-code, because you can launch quickly and iterate really, really fast.” From day one, the system provided a level of real-time insight the site had never had before. As they learned more about the process, they iterated constantly. Some apps in the system went through more than 50 updates.

The real breakthrough came when people began to trust the data. A cultural shift began to take hold. “It was no longer your Excel against my Excel,” Mario says. Teams were consulting the same source of truth, improving communication and focusing on analyzing data, not just capturing it.

The impact was staggering. The solution slashed work-in-progress inventory and the time required to consolidate shipping loads, and collaboration between teams soared. “They were no longer fighting each other,” he says. “They were pulling the effort in the same direction, which is something that was very, very amazing to witness.”

For Mario, citizen development has fundamentally changed how he approaches problem-solving. Where he once sought perfection, he now pursues progress. This new mindset – “Fail fast, learn quickly, and keep iterating” – has allowed him to deliver value continuously and uncover unexpected benefits along the way. He describes the “ripple effect” of his apps, sharing how operators will provide feedback to address new opportunities and use cases.

This impact isn’t limited to the solutions; Mario is actively cultivating a new generation of citizen developers at Smith+Nephew. People from the shop floor partnered with Mario in temporary roles, where he coached them not just on how to use the platform, but “how to deal with all the challenges of deploying applications and driving adoption.” This mentorship created real career pathways. Many of those he trained have since moved on to other roles within the company or at other companies. For Mario, it was a way to allow them to “be in a place where they could shine.”

Now, Mario is formalizing this grassroots movement by launching a citizen developer community in Costa Rica. The goal is to empower engineers to build smaller-scale solutions, like a digital logbook, that solve immediate problems while the central OT team focuses on larger, site-wide initiatives like MES or eDHR. Adapting a “User as Developer” program from a sister site, he’s already seeing a groundswell of interest. “People seem very excited,” he notes, “and there is a lot of interest in learning how to use the tool.”

His advice for aspiring builders is simple: “Just start. You don't need to be a software engineer to build great things with Tulip. All you need is basic logic, curiosity, and the right mindset.”