Celebrating Innovation: The Winners of the 2022 Tulip Groundbreaker Awards

Every year, the Tulip team recognizes exceptional customer stories through its Groundbreaker Awards program, which honors members of the Tulip community who are breaking new ground in frontline operations.

When it came time to determine the 2022 winners, the Tulip team received an overwhelming number of nominations highlighting a variety of our innovative customers around the world.

Read on to learn more about the winners of our prestigious Golden Shovel Award, which recognizes app builders for the impact they’ve made on their organizations through citizen development, and Greenhouse Award, which recognizes success in digital transformation, innovation, and leadership.

Our first winner, Eric Beyers, was nominated by three of his teammates in recognition of his work implementing Tulip across their operations — from work instructions to data collection — which enabled the Piaggio Fast Forward team to streamline their assembly of the Gita robot.

This two-wheeled, semi-autonomous personal robot — which can carry a user’s belongings as they walk around — has 150 unique parts, making it a particularly complex product to assemble. As the Piaggio Fast Forward team needed to build their production processes from the ground up, they required simple, repeatable work instructions and training materials to ensure quality standards were being met consistently.

By developing a full KPI dashboard using Tulip, Beyers was able to provide his team with the necessary production visibility — and the ability to identify opportunities for improvement in their production operation.

“I’ve really enjoyed working with the Tulip platform and using it to strengthen our data collection and improve our analysis of these production metrics,” said Beyers. “Tulip has made it very easy for us to digitize and quickly iterate our procedures as well as leverage applications as we expand our product lines.”

A Tulip customer since 2018, Stanley Black & Decker has seen significant value in its investment over the years.

Our next Golden Shovel award winner, Zeke Laws, has had a hand in developing Tulip at multiple Stanley Black & Decker sites. As part of the “Connected Factory” team, he’s helped to create an internal library of Tulip apps for scaling across multiple factories and sub brands. This has included developing Kanban and SMED systems with apps.

Laws is a true Tulip advocate, and has even started an “Ask the Expert” series to share best practices among the citizen developers across his organization.

“It’s been a huge blessing being able to help shop floors [and] help our factories and use Tulip to do so,” said Laws. “I’m very very grateful for the support that Tulip has given in this. They’ve been awesome, it’s been awesome using the platform, and I’m really excited to see where it goes.”

Check out the Augmented podcast to learn more about how Stanley Black & Decker is innovating across the manufacturing supply chain.

Our final Golden Shovel award winner, Hira Ahmad, was recognized for her use of Tulip work instructions to bridge the gap between Form Energy’s PLM and ERP systems.

“I helped implement Tulip at our facility here in Berkeley, California, where we take our engineering build specifications that are very unique and interpret them into dynamic work instructions for our technicians to follow,” explained Ahmad.

Using Tulip’s intuitive app editor with no-code capabilities, Ahmad was able to translate complex designs from the engineering teams into user-friendly apps — ultimately empowering her organization to produce cost-effective renewable energy solutions.

Our first Greenhouse Award winner, Ultra Clean Technology, was recognized for successfully developing and deploying a system of Tulip applications to compose a solution with full MES functionality in less than six months. This system — which Ultra Clean Technology continues to scale — responds directly to the needs of the team serving the semiconductor industry.

“We selected Tulip earlier this year to be the platform of choice for our MES system, primarily for its low-code [and] no-code capabilities,” explained Rahul Naik, VP of Digital Transformation at Ultra Clean Technology.

“We have leveraged those capabilities along with some unorthodox approaches and we’ve been successful thus far. We want to thank the Tulip team for the steadfast support and assistance they have offered us along this journey so far — and we look forward to propagating the success globally along with Tulip.”

Our final Greenhouse Award winner, Outset Medical, has utilized the Tulip platform to create a paperless, compliant, and validated solution to support the full production of their class II medical devices.

The team was able to accomplish the amazing feat of bringing a new product to market in six months — and they continue to leverage Tulip to track real-time progress to identify and resolve any anomalies quickly. Ultimately, this enables them to introduce new production lines with unprecedented speed and agility.

“Outset Medical is excited to receive this award as it provides recognition and proof that 41R adoption in the process of digital manufacturing is not only for the Fortune 500 companies, but can be designed, developed, and drive meaningful impact for small and medium enterprise organizations,” said Marc Nash, VP of Manufacturing at Outset Medical (and a previous winner of Tulip’s Golden Bulb award).

Check out the Augmented podcast to learn more about how Outset Medical isdisrupting the dialysis industry by adopting industry 4.0 technologies.

The entire team here at Tulip congratulates the winners of our 2022 Groundbreaker Awards. Through their exceptional use of the Tulip platform, these customers have been able to optimize their operations in a variety of new and exciting ways. We look forward to seeing what they do next!

To learn more about the winners and the latest releases across the Tulip platform, watch the on-demand recording of our recent virtual event, Tulip Showcase.