10.5.23-Showcase-Tokyo-Tulip_Interfaces

RONY KUBAT: Hello, good afternoon, pretty late in the day. Appreciate everybody sticking around for all of this. If you are from a company that makes something, a drug, a machine, then this may be of use and relevance to you.

So just curious, who here has heard of Industry 4.0? And a few of you here. So Industry 4.0 is-- sort of been the promise of the last few years, about bringing new software and technology to the manufacturing industry. But fundamentally, we believe that there has been a failure in that because they've discounted and not really thought of the human operations that exist in there.

And if you look at where are the problems in manufacturing, oftentimes, you can trace them back to what is ultimately in some way a human issue. And the current software is not addressing that. In particular, I'm a-- my background is in mechanical engineering and software development.

And I have a suite of tools that I use every day to get my job done. I have CAD software, I've got IDEs that let me-- help me in the development of my software. But if you are a manufacturing engineer, those kind of tools fundamentally don't exist. There's lots of software out there for the manufacturing world, but they're not designed in a human-centered form, and they're not designed in a way which is supporting the OT side of a company.

So this is kind of the problem that we're trying to address. And the way that we're doing this, in one sentence, is Tulip is a no-code connected GxP-ready application platform. So to unpack that a little bit, what we mean by no-code is that as someone involved on the shop floor, a manufacturing engineer, you don't have to be a software developer to create a bespoke interface and piece of software to run your operation. So you can create this software very, very quickly.

The connected part is that manufacturing is obviously very physical, and there are tools, sensors, machines, and other systems that are part of that process that you want to be able to collect data from, and interact with, and transact with. So Tulip has ways to connect both to the downstream system, to the sensors and smart tools and the like that are on the floor, and also to the ERPs, the PLMs, the MESes, the MRPs, and the other three-letter acronym systems that exist in a factory.

The third part, the GxP part, this will be relevant to anybody who's in a regulated industry. So Tulip is a validated platform, a good fraction of our use cases are in medical devices and pharmaceutical manufacture. And as an application platform, what we mean by this is that something that is a sort of central connecting layer across multiple different, typically siloed pieces of software on the floor.

The way we solve that is in these four components. So the first part is that there is a web-based editor to create the actual applications for the shop floor. This is something that looks like a PowerPoint that you could pick up in an afternoon and deploy an application that same day.

The second part is on the connectivity to the edge. So we actually are-- we make some hardware to let you connect in that last sort of 6 inches to the tools and sensors that are on the floor. Once you've done that and you have these applications, they start generating a lot of data that is very contextual. Who's doing what, where, when, how long does it take? What's the environment like when all that's happening?

And so we've built a real-time analytics platform that sits on top of all of this so you can make use of all this data and use this to help, in a data-driven way, foster continuous improvements and lean efforts within the factory.

And then finally, there's an ecosystem of content that allows you to connect to systems that are out there, as well as not start from a blank page. So there's a library that allows you to bring pre-built applications, or components of applications, in to have a starting place and be able to deploy very quickly.

This is a little bit of what it looks like. And what you see in the center is the actual application being built. And surrounding this in the web browser is the way that you go about configuring the screens and assigning logic to them.

The kinds of places that this could be used within the factory floor is throughout the life cycle in the factory, from incoming goods inspection to kitting, inventory control, being able to do guided work instructions and SOPs for assembly type processes, materials management, quality and inspection, and even shipping. So these are the kinds of places where we currently have deployments in the field.

The reasons why companies are deploying Tulip, kind of boiled down into three major buckets of ROI. The first is improvements in the quality. So right first time and first pass yield for products under manufacturing. Effectively, very often, we've found that Tulip can eliminate the human root caused errors as part of the manufacturing process.

The second category is in overall throughput. So you can make more stuff faster if you're able to iterate on your process much faster and close a feedback loop that comes from having the data available.

And then the third bucket is being able to train new employees much faster to get them up to the point of the level of quality that's required. This is not just anecdotal data that's come to us, but Forrester Consulting ran a study about uses of Tulip on the shop floor and found that more than a 4x return on investment from deployments.

So we never set out to become a Manufacturing Execution System company, an MES, for those that are familiar with the term. But when we started speaking to the Gartner folks, they said to us, well, you don't call yourself an MES company, but your customers are using you as an MES. And I don't care what you call yourself, you're being used as an MES. So they put us now, for the third year, on the Magic Quadrant for MESes.

Now we're here, for those that can see from the slide. But the interesting thing that's happened is, how this landscape changing? So what you're seeing here now is sort of a comparison between this year's MES quadrant and last year's MES quadrant. And there's been a lot of movement from a lot of the traditional MES providers, like here, AVEVA that's gone down, or SAP that's gone down, or Oracle that's gone down.

And I think this is reflective of a change in the landscape, a change of the way of thinking about how this kind of software can work in the factory, and about being more of a composable software pattern.

So in that traditional mechanism of thinking about manufacturing processes, you have-- it's very much a top-down, process-centric perspective. But the advantage of a platform like Tulip is that you can have this kind of more emergent control. You're breaking it apart and allowing for the people on the ground, who have the greatest amount of knowledge and information about that process, to be able to change it effectively. And as a result of that, end up with a more optimized system in the end.

So the other factor that happens when you can empower the operations technology teams is you can very quickly arrive to value. So in a typical MES implementation, if anyone's been through it, the joke is three years, $3 million, and you get three screens out of it.

But this is not true for when you can start to build your own applications yourself. So you can get-- the time to value is very, very quick. You can deploy-- even in a regulated pharmaceutical-type environment, you can deploy an electronic logbook in a matter of months.

Like I mentioned in the beginning, if you are a maker of things, we'd love to talk to you and see if we'd be able to help out. Thanks.