What is Tulip’s role in Industry 4.0?

Tulip’s role is to provide an easy to use, digitalised solution for manufacturers to enable a more efficient production process. The Industry 4.0 revolution is transforming industrial and manufacturing processes rapidly and we aspire to provide companies with opportunities to ease into this growing and evolving industry.

How is Tulip assisting enhance productivity across APAC?

Tulip’s Frontline Operations Platform has been developed for precisely this reason – to enhance productivity among manufacturing and production players by enabling them to develop digital solutions. In addition, our platform provides productivity and quality measurements for manufacturers and producers to enhance their effectiveness and efficiency.

At Tulip, we focus primarily on frontline workers and believe there is an exponential potential in this area. To date, this area of the workforce has been left out of digitisation considerations.

This is where Tulip comes in with our human-centric and low-code approach. Without any programming effort, the people who are really affected and involved in manufacturing and production daily can develop digital solutions that really improve efficiencies in their work.

For example, these could be digital work instructions, quality assurance measures or documentation. In this way, productivity can be increased step by step throughout the entire production process.

How do you see manufacturing’s future at present?

We believe the manufacturing industry will continue to evolve significantly with new areas of growth and pockets of opportunity emerging.

More and more companies are beginning to understand the challenges of having a single monolithic solution due to each site having different needs and requirements.

A composable approach, where companies can fit their sites and stations with the tools, machines, and capabilities they need—but with oversight visibility—is critical in today’s rapidly evolving world.

In today’s dynamic manufacturing environment, the ability to adjust to changes in demand, supply chain challenges, and other factors is imperative.

Additionally, we believe that automating the entire manufacturing or production process will not be the solution for industry players.

Instead, we observe companies adopting solutions that take into account the needs and skillsets of frontline operators, the people who witness the actual problems that need to be solved, and give them the tools that they need and will actually use to solve them.

This human-centric approach to integrating technology into the shopfloor processes is a more effective way to bring manufacturing operations into the future.

How do you see AI assisting manufacturing in the future?
For better or worse, AI is everywhere. But in manufacturing, we believe that when implemented properly – it is for better.

For example, it can be used to augment and support the frontline workforce by speeding up their work, supplying information to them faster, “reading” through documents quicker and giving them access to data that was not previously available to them.

The sheer volume of information that would once take operations managers and data analysts days or weeks to process can now be analyzed promptly, allowing insights from manufacturing processes to be gleaned at a faster pace, and improving workforce efficiency.

AI is not at its zenith – so do we use what is there now or wait for future enhancements?
I believe using AI now is not an issue, as AI will continuously evolve. It will be pointless to wait for future enhancements as just when you believe that AI might have reached its peak, there will be another breakthrough that it is able to achieve, making it an endless wait to adopt AI in the future instead.

Adopting AI today is not about being completely reliant on the technology, but more about utilising the tool to enhance human capabilities. However, in response to future enhancements, organisations need to ensure that their AI strategy and utilisation of the technology is reassessed and updated. It is a tool and strategy that requires constant revisiting.

One of the issues with financial commitment to technology for manufacturers is the unknown about contract manufacturing. If that is not there, then why should a company commit financially?
Making a decision about choosing a contract manufacturer is the same as any other decision a business makes when it comes to operations. Companies should conduct their due diligence to ensure that any contract manufacturer they have selected to collaborate with can support their needs not only for the present but also for the foreseeable future.

This means that the contract manufacturers should be able to pivot and adjust depending on changes in supply and demand, changes to product, geopolitical concerns, and other potential disruptions. Understanding how flexible the technology they are utilising is an important factor during the decision-making process.