Continuous Improvement That Actually Stays Continuous
Empower your CI team to build and adapt andon boards, kanban loops, and standard work themselves, without waiting on IT.
Improvement ideas outrun the capacity to implement them. Changing a work instruction, an audit, or a kanban loop means a ticket queue or a vendor release window, so the backlog grows fastest in the programs working best.
The standard on the floor stays months behind what the team already knows.
Configurable app suites from the Tulip Library, connected to what your machines and operators are doing right now.
Operators raise an alert from the station. It routes to a named person and escalates when it goes overdue.
Hold a part at the station until it passes. Vision detectors verify what an operator can miss.
Versioned digital work instructions that get revised when the standard does, with approvals.
Runs manually with no machine connection, or automatically once the machine is on the network.
Tulip is a composable operations platform. The workflows are yours to build and change, with native AI to speed the building, governance that holds across sites, and real-time production data available on-demand.
The process engineers who know the work build and change the workflows themselves, without a vendor ticket or a place in a development queue.
Turn documents you already have into working apps, ask questions of your operations data in plain language, and hand routine workflow steps to agents. Agents are in beta.
Data lands in Tulip as operators work and machines run, so dashboards show the current state of the line instead of yesterday's numbers.
Every change is versioned and, where you need it, approved before deploying. What works at one site moves to the next. Both sit on the Enterprise plan.
Customer stories
See how leading manufacturers use Tulip to improve their operations. Select a company to see the detail behind each result.
“We’ve seen our quality issues drop dramatically because the machine can’t enter production without a first-piece inspection.”
Four US extrusion sites moved off a homegrown system, paper forms and disconnected spreadsheets onto one standard that each site could skin differently.
Tulip is sort of the quintessential tool to enable augmented lean. Applying Tulip to changeover is exactly what we mean by lean digital.
Before this, we spent 20 hours a week editing schedules — and errors caused chaos on the shop floor. Now everything updates automatically overnight.
One engineer at the Holliston site got back the time that used to go into editing production schedules by hand, and the errors that came with it.
"We used to be a batch process. Tulip gave us visibility into WIP, and once we could see it, we could start managing flow."
Two regulated production lines launched in under six months, with the compliance posture arriving as part of the architecture rather than as a later project.
Andon boards, kanban loops, audit checklists and standard work are authored in the App Editor without writing code. Process engineers and CI leads do the authoring; operators run what's published. An existing PDF procedure can be converted into a starting app rather than rebuilt.
Version history shows what changed in a workflow, who changed it and when. Where your quality system needs a sign-off, named approvers review the change before it deploys. Permissions decide who can author, who can approve, and who can only run what's published.
What one site proves out doesn't get rebuilt at the next one. The common part of the process travels; each site adapts the parts that genuinely differ, like labels, languages and local work centers. Leaders compare performance across lines and sites in one place.
OEE, downtime reasons, scrap and cycle time are captured while the work happens. Tulip takes them from the machines that are running and from the systems that already hold your orders and materials, so nobody is transcribing numbers at the end of a shift.
Tulip connects to the systems already running your floor instead of asking you to replace them. Machine data and your system of record both come in, along with what gets captured during assembly.
Tulip connects to SAP and other major ERPs, so production data doesn't live in two places.
OPC UA and MQTT connect natively, part of 700+ device integrations that bring machine and sensor data in alongside what operators enter by hand.
60+ pre-built connectors cover the QMS, PLM, and other business systems most manufacturers already run, plus an open API for anything else.
Lean manufacturing software digitizes the tools a lean program already runs on: standard work, andon, kanban, 5S and layered audits, and the daily management board. The useful ones also capture data while the work happens, so scrap, cycle time and downtime reasons come off the line as a by-product of running it rather than as a separate reporting exercise.
That matters because most of the seven wastes are invisible on a monthly report and obvious in step-level data.
Most often the CI or operations engineering team, with IT involved for security review, governance, and integration support.
That split is what Tulip is built for.
The people closest to the process build and change the workflows, while IT keeps control of permissions, access, and how the platform connects to the rest of the stack.
Roles are configurable, so each plant decides who builds, who approves and who only runs what has been published.
Three things.
First, the workflows are built and changed by the people who run the process, so an improvement found this week doesn't wait on a vendor release.
Second, the whole toolkit (standard work, andon, kanban, audits, daily management) runs on one data model, so changing one part doesn't break reporting somewhere else.
Third, prebuilt lean apps mean a team starts from something that already works rather than a blank canvas.
Yes - bringing lean principles into highly regulated environments like pharmaceutical, medical device, and aerospace and defense is exactly where Tulip shines.
Traditionally, "lean" and "regulated" have felt like opposing forces. Continuous improvement requires rapid iteration, but strict compliance (like FDA or defense regulations) demands rigorous change control, often resulting in slow, paper-heavy, and inflexible processes.
Tulip bridges this gap with a composable platform that makes compliance a seamless byproduct of doing the work right the first time. We call it "compliance at execution". By digitizing frontline workflows, you gain the agility to run lean continuous improvement (Kaizen) cycles while automatically generating the exact digital audit trails your quality and validation teams demand.
The Lean Benefit: Your engineers can rapidly iterate on standard work (Kaizen) to eliminate waste, while the platform automatically generates the precise, audit-ready documentation your quality team demands.
For years, manufacturers had to choose between two dead ends: buy a rigid legacy MES (stable but slow and expensive to change) or build homemade point solutions (fast but brittle and ungoverned).
Tulip bridges this gap as a composable operations platform — a layer that sits across your existing systems. Instead of forcing your processes to fit rigid software, your teams build the exact solutions they need to address their biggest operational challenges.
Structured and unstructured data from people, machines, and systems all land on one common data model, giving you the agility to adapt lean processes instantly while governance is inherited by design as you scale.
We make error-proofing dynamic by connecting your physical tools directly to your digital workflows. Because the platform talks directly to your smart devices, the system physically enforces quality as the work happens. A workflow can simply refuse to let an operator move to the next step if a screw is not torqued to the exact spec or if a part is underweight. While native AI is built in to help spot visual anomalies, the foundation of our error proofing is connecting your everyday equipment so your workflows run on what is actually true right now.
No. A core principle of lean is empowering the frontline, and Tulip is built around that exact idea. The people who actually run the process are the ones who author the solutions. You do not have to submit an IT ticket and wait for months. With intuitive building blocks and AI handling the heavy lifting of the initial build, your manufacturing experts can turn existing SOPs into working apps in a matter of hours. When they find a way to improve the process, they can tweak the app in minutes.
Walk through the workflows with our team and decide what you would build first.