Introduction
Hello and welcome. My name is Michael Roberts, Vice President of Sales and Marketing with SPK and Associates. Today we’re here to talk about a topic that is really important for manufacturers.
Manufacturers are constantly under pressure to improve production efficiency while maintaining the highest levels of quality. But many teams still struggle with limited visibility into what’s actually happening on the factory floor in real time.
Without accurate data from machines, operators, or even production systems, many small issues can quickly turn into costly downtime or quality issues.
In today’s vlog, I’m joined by Edwin Chung.
Ed, please feel free to introduce yourself.
Hi, thank you, Michael. My name is Ed Chung. I work here at SPK. I’m VP of Professional Services. I’ve been here for 18 years.
At SPK, we help accelerate your engineering productivity and reduce timelines and time to market. My specific focus is regulatory FDA compliance and ISO standards. How do I ensure that everything is going fast, but the quality still stays up to the standard that we want for our outputs?
Awesome. And one of the things is Tulip, right? That’s what we’re talking about today.
Exactly. Exactly.
We are going to talk about manufacturing and Tulip, and how Tulip’s composable manufacturing platform can help gain some of that real-time production visibility, improve quality outcomes—which I know is important for you—and also scale digital manufacturing solutions across one or multiple facilities.
Real-Time Dashboards and Machine Data
We’re going to talk about a couple different areas. First, I want to talk about real-time dashboards.
So Ed, from what you’ve seen, how are companies using real-time dashboards and machine data to foresee and potentially address issues ahead of time before they become production-stopping problems?
Yes, absolutely.
Let me talk about the not-as-positive side first. I see a lot of places still doing paper-based or scanned paper-based systems, and it takes a week or even a month to get back the metrics.
When you have a system like Tulip, it can make these dashboards immediately. It can tell you your defect rate, your scrap rate, and the data you need for root cause analysis.
As soon as you implement a change, as soon as you look at the metrics and decide where you might want to implement a change in your manufacturing process, you implement the change and then you can see results within a day or less.
Ultimately, this is a really important thing. Lower your defect rates and increase first-pass yield. This is what we want for our quality improvements.
For example, I’ve got one for you. DMG Mori recently started using Tulip on one of their assembly lines. They saw a 66% improvement in product quality, a reduction in first-pass failures, and they saw a 60% reduction in costs, which they measured in real time on a dashboard.
So it’s very justifiable with those dashboards.
Yeah, the whole idea is to be able to change something to improve it and be able to measure things that happen from that and determine if it’s moving the right way or not.
Being able to have that information in real time is really important in manufacturing, and first-pass yield and first-pass failure are really important metrics to use.
So thanks for sharing that.
Scaling Tulip Across Facilities
So Ed, next area.
Once you have those metrics and you know what you’re looking for and what success on one line or one plant may look like, what are some best practices for scaling Tulip across a company, across multiple facilities or multiple plants?
Tulip is very designed to scale. It’s enterprise-ready. It has multilingual support.
When you have different facilities and different sites, you can reuse the applications that you made in Tulip or reuse the application templates that come out of the box.
Deploy it in one place, deploy it everywhere.
It integrates with existing machinery and equipment that’s already in place.
Even though it’s in multiple sites, it is still connected. So you can still get all of your real-time data aggregation from all of your different sites into one dashboard.
We just talked about dashboards. Into your digital workflows, you can merge them all together. Merge all your product lines or separate them depending on which metrics you’re looking at.
You can gain a lot of insight as executives or managers into your production lines, and you can have a single source of truth.
This is something we talk about specifically in the medical device industry—the single source of truth for performance and quality of your product output.
Another story I have is about digital thread.
There’s a company out there where one of the things they always had to do was trace the end product with a serial number. They needed to know all the components that went into it.
They needed to trace back what supplier gave them a particular tube, when it was received, what lot it was, and all those kinds of things.
They used to have a team of four people manually doing it.
They would get a complaint and say, “We have this CAPA. Do the analysis on this one serial number. Figure out everything else, then go backwards and see if it affected other products that were made from the same batch.”
Those four people are now doing other things.
Using Tulip, they immediately access the information without spending a week or a month researching it. It’s live data. They know exactly where all of that information is because Tulip automatically OCRs and scans via pictures everything from top to bottom, puts it into the database, and reports back on it.
AI, Automation, and the Future of Manufacturing
It sounds like years ago I felt like we’d have flying cars and all this stuff. This kind of feels like a flying car to me for manufacturing.
Being able to have a camera look at something, evaluate information, capture things, and not have humans do it.
Thanks for the examples here, Ed.
Yeah, I think it’s really exciting.
There’s been what people call the democratization of technology. Before, you had to have a team of people implementing huge enterprise systems for millions or tens of millions of dollars to do image analysis.
Now AI is trickling down to the masses. You don’t need a whole team anymore.
You can have one person using one platform, Tulip, to implement these automations. A lot of it is visual-based, but also sensor-based, grabbing-based, touch-based, weight-based—many different inputs inside your manufacturing line.
Everything is updated every day.
I don’t know. It is a little bit like a flying car. It’s magic.
At least I still think it’s magic.
Ed, thank you for your time. Really appreciate it.
Thank you for talking to me about it, Michael. I’m very excited about it and I’d be happy to talk about it more anytime you want.
Closing
As manufacturers continue their digital transformation journey, the ability to capture real-time data and turn it into actionable insights is becoming a real competitive advantage.
Platforms like Tulip allow teams to connect machines, operators, and quality processes into a single environment that improves visibility, reduces defects, and helps organizations scale those best practices across different facilities.
If you’re exploring ways to modernize production management, improve quality outcomes, or implement a real-time manufacturing dashboard, Ed would love to talk with you and we can help guide you through that.
Thanks for joining us today and joining the discussion.
Be sure to subscribe to the SPK and Associates YouTube channel for more insights on digital manufacturing, engineering, DevOps, software, and engineering technology topics.
Thanks to Ed again for joining us.
You’re welcome. Thank you for having me.
Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.
See you next time, guys.
