Golden Shovel Spotlight

For Zachary Kreiley, a Continuous Improvement Engineer at Stanley Black & Decker’s Holliston site, the path to becoming a leader in digital innovation started with a unique perspective. Five years ago, he was a welder on the site’s production line. This firsthand experience gave him a ground-level view of the operation…and of the potential for optimization.

“There were just so many times where I thought, we can do better than this,” Zach recalls. Moving into the machine shop as a tool and die maker, he saw many opportunities to streamline manual and time-consuming processes, particularly those that relied on paper schedules. These moments stuck with him, providing a clear vision for the changes he wanted to drive.

When Zach transitioned into his Continuous Improvement Coordinator role, he was given the trust and autonomy to find opportunities to make an impact. Having seen Tulip in another department, he dove headfirst into learning the platform. Without any prior software development experience, Zach quickly got up to speed using Tulip’s documentation, videos, and by collaborating with the support team.

“I really thought in the beginning it was just a schedule on a screen, but it was so much more than that,” he explains. “Every problem, every app you make has very unique requirements, and 99% of the time, Tulip can handle it.”

His first major project tackled a key challenge: three sub-departments within a larger department needed visibility into each other’s production schedule statuses but were operating in silos with a mix of separate apps and a lack of visual management tools. This lack of centralized visibility made it difficult to track parts as they moved through the production process. To solve this, Zach developed the Consolidated Production app, a unified solution that merged the separate apps into a single source of truth. Among its many enhancements are alert functionalities to notify upstream and downstream departments of production issues, and the data it collects populates digital dashboards for real-time performance visibility, creating a seamless visual management environment.

His process was deeply rooted in continuous iteration and direct feedback, partnering closely with operators and supervisors to meet their distinct needs. “With operators, I was asking things like, how do they want to select a day of their schedule? Where should buttons be placed to streamline the workflow?” he says. “With supervisors, it was more about, did they care first about schedule compliance or something else?” The impact went beyond a streamlined workflow; it fostered a significant boost in morale, teamwork, and accountability across departments.

Moving into his role of Continuous Improvement Engineer, he started focusing on larger, more complex endeavors. Of all his projects, Zach is particularly proud of the integration between SAP and Tulip. The challenge was a manual, error-prone process for updating production schedules. Digital schedules exported from SAP were never meant for a platform like Tulip and were missing critical information, like production quantities, or in some cases didn’t exist at all. This forced team members to compare them with printed versions and manually input data or heavily modify a schedule using tribal knowledge to suit the needs of another department. “It was really close to 15 to 20 hours per week in editing schedules,” Zach says.

The solution was a two-part breakthrough. First, after months of intensive collaboration with IT, they redefined the schedules in SAP to ensure the data was trustworthy at its source. But even with good data, manually exporting from SAP and uploading schedules to Tulip for dozens of machines wasn’t scalable, so Zach built a fully automated workflow using a SQL server and Tulip Automations. Now, SAP runs transactions automatically every night, and Tulip Automations sort and distribute the data to the correct tables. “Operators can come in in the morning, log in, and have a fresh new set of parts to make, and it can be trusted,” he explains.

The impact has been massive for labor time savings. More importantly, it provides the scalability needed to achieve a major strategic goal for the site. “If we did not have this, there would be absolutely no way we would have been able to go paperless across all of our manufacturing departments,” Zach said.

One of Zach’s most creative and innovative solutions is a fully digital Kanban system, building on the core principles of Kanban. He recognized that the traditional card-based replenishment system had drawbacks, noting that “there’s still a lot of human intervention that has to take place. And when you're trying to do that across the footprint of a whole factory, it can break down.” To solve this, he envisioned and built an entirely new system in Tulip.

The digital Kanban system connects the digital schedules of two key departments: a housing department that makes toolboxes and a paint department that consumes them. A Tulip Automation analyzes the paint schedule as soon as it’s uploaded, compares the required parts to a master Kanban stock table, and deducts the stock over time. Once a part reaches its minimum level, the system automatically creates a replenishment job in the housing department’s schedule. The ease of making changes to this system is another benefit. If maximum or minimum stock values need adjustment or another product is being added into this digital kanban system, all it takes is updating or creating a new record in the Tulip Kanban stock table.

“It's still just in time. Demand is still driving replenishment but it's completely hands-off,” Zach explains. “No one has to be trained on this process. It just will all happen automatically.” This eliminates paper cards, prevents stockouts or overproducing, and ensures greater accuracy, entirely executed without manual involvement.

Zach’s impact extends far beyond the apps he builds. He has become a mentor and a go-to resource for citizen development, fostering a culture of continuous improvement that empowers his colleagues. He sees his role in simpler terms: “helping someone, regardless of what it will do for you.” This philosophy was shaped by his own career, where colleagues gave him a voice and supported him on his own journey.

For those looking to follow in his footsteps, his core philosophy is to “start small and work your way up.” “You need hands-on training, you need practice,” he notes. “Build something. It doesn’t have to be huge. It can be digitizing a paper checklist. But try to build something that's going to solve a real problem for yourself, or for other people.”

For Zach, seeing a solution make a real impact is always the most powerful motivator. “It's really addicting! Soon you're going to want to build a Tulip application for every problem that you see.” It’s this passion for problem-solving and empowering people that makes Zachary Kreiley a true Groundbreaker.