In an ideal world, digital transformation demands the commitment of those at the top of the hierarchy in an enterprise. As such, manufacturing leaders are signing on to navigate the muddy waters of digital transformation, but they’re not bearing in mind the grassroots level—employees and managers—that provides them an advantage. Governed by a mission of bringing a bottom-up digital transformation to the manufacturing workforce, Tulip places the manufacturing staff at the forefront of the digital transformation initiatives, improving the way they run and digitize their factories.

Despite the proliferation of automation technologies on the shop-floor, the manufacturing workforce still relies on analog tools to carry out complex tasks such as complex manual assemblies, machine maintenance, and data collection. Tulip changes this status quo. With the dawn of Industry 4.0—the fourth industrial revolution—signifying the transformation of manufacturing from traditional analog to the full-scale digital of the modern era, Tulip empowers the engineers—the people closest to the operations—with the tools they need to digitize their processes.

Tulip presents a distinctive bottom-up approach to streamlining digital transformation with a platform that simplifies creating apps through an intuitive self-serve platform. “Our platform empowers those closest to operations to drive the digital transformation of their factories by digitizing it one manufacturing app at a time,” states Natan Linder, Tulip’s Co-Founder and CEO.

Having pioneered manufacturing apps in the market, Tulip’s uniqueness stems from its self-serve approach to digital transformation.

Its Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) empowers those closest to operations to create apps that turn traditional analog processes into instrumented digital processes that collect real-time human and machine data. The data captured from these apps is then transferred to Tulip’s robust analytics engine so process engineers and managers can create comprehensive dashboards to visualize their operations, identify and mitigate bottlenecks and continuously improve. “This bottom-up, piecewise approach to Industry 4.0 significantly de-risks digital transformation initiatives and enables manufacturers to achieve a faster time-to-value by leveraging their own teams to build and improve their apps,” added Linder.

The company recently launched the industry’s first Manufacturing App Library: a growing list of apps available for anyone to try for free. The platform’s intuitive drag and drop interface makes it easy for users to customize these apps or build their own from scratch without having to write any code. Users can create analytics dashboards to visualize their operations and plug and play their machines, devices and IoT enabled sensors through Tulip’s I/O Gateway, which supports a growing list of devices out of the box. Apps can be integrated with third party tools such as existing ERP and MES systems and databases without having to rely on IT or third party integrators. Though Tulip is a cloud-based platform, it can additionally be deployed as an on-premise solution.

One of Tulip’s clients, Nautique, a leading motorboat manufacturing company, was tasked with performing process improvements and time studies for a production process involving a large number of parts and operators. The client’s process engineering team found it inefficient to perform the manual collection of information they needed to make data-driven decisions. After implementing Tulip, the process engineers were able to build their own manufacturing apps, which enable managers to track individual operator performance in the upholstery operation and determine the average time of the operational cycles. This empowered Nautique’s process engineering team to increase their labor utilization by 9.6 percent and reduce their build cycle time by 19 percent, with real-time targeted feedback and increased productivity.

Earlier this year, Tulip was awarded the prestigious “Technology Pioneer” recognition by the World Economic Forum, and the company was also selected by Amazon AWS as an Industrial Competency Partner. With a significant footprint covering 12 countries across the U.S., Europe, South America, and Asia, Tulip’s newly launched free-trial, is accelerating its outreach across the globe.