10.10.23-Showcase-Seoul-Tulip_Interfaces

RONY KUBAT: Hello. Good afternoon, everyone. Sorry I was not able to make it there in person today. My name is Rony Kubat. I'm the cofounder and CTO of Tulip. We are a spin-out from the MIT Media Lab, just now-- just after nine years old.

So let me start out by talking about the problem that we're trying to solve. So despite the promise of many years now of Industry 4.0-- the folks here, familiar with the term-- and the investment that has happened into automation and systems for the manufacturing industry, fundamentally, the root cause of a lot of the problems can be traced back to the people that are there.

My background is coming from as a mechanical engineer, as a software engineer. I have tools to do my job. I have CAD software that I can use-- CAM software. I have IDEs, debuggers, all sorts of variety of tools that can help me do my work.

But if you are a manufacturing engineer, fundamentally, you don't have tools for you to use. The tool I see most often on the factory floor is paper. And if it's a digital tool, it's Excel. So this is kind of where we at Tulip are trying to fill a gap.

We want-- are building a tool that allows for-- to focus on the people on the shop floor, the operators, and the manufacturing engineers that support those processes, and as a tool that is flexible and composable, that allows for our manufacturing engineer to create their own software.

So in a sentence, Tulip is this no-code, connected, GxP-ready, applications platform. And to unpack that a little bit, what we mean by no code is that you don't have to be a software developer to create interactive applications that are solving real problems.

You can start using the tool and, in a matter of a couple of hours, have an application on the shop floor. By connected, we mean that it's connected not only to the systems that are in use on the factory floor, the smart tools and sensors and machines, but also upstream systems-- so ERPs, PLMs, MRPs, and the other sort of IT infrastructure that runs the business.

A GxP ready-- this is because a large fraction of our customers are manufacturers of medical devices and of pharmaceuticals. So we have to adhere to the regulatory requirements that they have. So Tulip is a validated tool that is now used in production, both in pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturer.

And then finally, as an application platform for frontline operations, what I mean is that this tool exists within a much larger ecosystem of different kinds of software and tools and is a connective tissue for all of these on the shop floor.

So what it looks like in terms of the actual product, it has these four core elements. There's a web-based application development platform. So I log in, and I can create my-- create apps. I can manage them, create and manage the data structures that are tied into that, as well as a runtime environment, where those applications get run-- on tablets, phones, PCs, basically any sort of compute infrastructure that people use.

The second component is an edge component. So we have-- we make these two edge devices that you can see on screen. These allow for that last six inches of connectivity to devices and systems that are on the shop floor to the machines, the smart tools, sensors, PLCs, and things like that. The connectors allow us to connect to either cloud-based or on-premises systems like the ERPs.

The third component is a real-time analytics system that's built into the platform because the applications are generating a lot of data, a lot of highly contextual data. Who's doing what, where? How long are they taking? What is the context of the work that they're doing? And this analytics platform is focused on collecting that data and making it useful for a manufacturing engineer to understand what's happening on the floor and to optimize it.

The final component is an ecosystem and content. So an ecosystem of different partners, technology partners, that have contributed compatibility layers to their systems, and content so that as a manufacturing engineer, you don't start out with a blank page. You have a wide variety of different kinds of common manufacturing applications that you can use and customize to your needs.

So this is what it looks like a little bit under the hood. So if I'm an engineer, I log in to the system. This is how I build my applications. It looks like a presentation tool on purpose. We want it to be very easy to learn.

And I can create logic with simple if this, then that type of triggers-- what we call triggers. The rest of it is drag-and-drop widgets. The kinds of applications you can build cover everything that you use on the factory floor, from the inspection of materials coming in, kitting them, assembling them, monitoring machines that are in use on the floor, inspections, materials management, shipping and receiving, and prepping to ship.

So you can begin with a small component of that or-- and gain value from just that small bit. And you can also link all of these applications together in a way that gives you, really, a platform for running your shop floor.

So the way that our customers are seeing return on their investment-- this is data from a study that was run by Forrester Consulting. But it sort of comes in these large buckets. You have increases in overall performance because you're able to better optimize your system-- double-digit improvements in overall performance.

The second is improvements in quality. We've seen multiple customers that have been able to effectively eliminate the human-caused problems in quality issues through the implementation of Tulip.

The third is an improvements in training time, being able to take someone off the street, train them in your processes, and get them to an acceptable level of quality with lowering the amount of time that an experienced employee needs to supervise. And then finally, because it's your own manufacturing engineers that are developing these applications, you don't need to outsource some of this work to external system integrators.

So when we started Tulip, we never started out to make a Manufacturing Execution System, an MES. But when speaking to Gartner, they interviewed our customers and said, we're going to put you in the Magic Quadrant for MES. I don't care what you say you are, but your customers are using you as an MES.

So we're now, for the third year, part of the Magic Quadrant. But what's kind of interesting about this is the dynamics of this industry. So the MES world is changing. This is just taking a look at the last two years compared to each other, just to see where things have moved.

So you see some of the leading players, like AVEVA or SAP and Honeywell getting pushed down. We're here on the-- in the challengers area, moving towards leaders. And I think that that's mostly interesting because it's indicative of this change in the software world of manufacturing, moving towards composable systems.

So what I mean by that is in a traditional manufacturing environment, you have a very rigid hierarchy. You have a very process-centric flow to the design of the systems here. And the software is in a similar fashion.

Now, by contrast, a composable approach is coming from the bottom up and allows for an emergent control to come about. And as a result of that, we believe and can show now that this is a much more resilient system and one that can get value faster than the traditional approaches.

And that's because you can start, like I said, very small. It's very low risk to get started and begin that process. And as you develop applications for the shop floor, the amount of data that you're getting increases. The amount of value that you're getting is increasing. And it can happen very, very quickly.

So we've been able to deploy MES systems in a couple of months into production and in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, electronic batch record systems in just several months. So I'm not there today because of COVID. But this brings back two years ago to when the pandemic started and when nobody knew what was going on.

And everybody was trying to do their part to help out some way with the frontline workers. So we connected to a grassroots effort called Masks On. That's this group that you see on the left side. What they made-- this is a self-organizing community online that developed an adapter that would convert snorkeling masks, like the one this physician is wearing-- there's an adapter here at the top that allows for an anesthesiologist machine's PPE filter or a HEPA filter to be attached to it and protect the physicians.

They had a donation of thousands of these face masks and needed to produce these adapters so they could distribute them to hospitals, basically, throughout the United States. In a week, we basically developed an entire MES for this distributed manufacturing environment.

So we'd have these off-the-shelf items, the masks. We'd have rapidly designed 3D-printed components that would be couriered to assembly centers, and then from those assembly centers, couriered out to the clinicians in need. All of this distributed throughout the United States.

And so during the course of that week, one of our employees, Mark Freedman, developed a full MES solution for this that had from order entry, inventory, packaging, and shipping, integration to third party, to go ship out, to manage shipping, as well as mobile applications for material handlers and the couriers that would be delivering those PPE out to the hospitals.

So as I said, this is an example of what you can do with a no-code platform such as Tulip. So unfortunately, I can't be there. But please do feel free to reach out to me if there's any interest. We have a growing presence here in APAC. So if you make things, maybe we'll be able to help. Thanks.