Streamlining Kitting and Production with Tulip at ProveIt! 2025
4.0 Solutions
Helping accelerate digital transformation of Industry by educating the market on IIoT, Industry 4.0 and Transformation
January 29, 2025
Tulip is a Silver Sponsor for ProveIt! Conference 2025.
What follows is the Functional Specification for Tulip’s demonstration at the upcoming ProveIt! Conference, taking place February 18 - 20, 2025 at the Westin Galleria Conference Center in Dallas, TX. ?
Tickets to the conference can be purchased here.
?
What is ProveIt!?
ProveIt! is an industry-focused conference where vendors showcase solutions by integrating their hardware and software into a simulated manufacturing environment. Vendors connect their technology to a virtual factory, solving real-world challenges and demonstrating the value of their offerings in front of a live audience. ?
What are the Goals for the Conference?
The conference aims to create a collaborative environment where vendors can “prove” their solutions in action. By connecting to a Unified Namespace (UNS) and addressing common manufacturing challenges, vendors will showcase practical, innovative approaches that improve manufacturing processes for companies of all sizes. ?
What is Our Virtual Factory?
The ProveIt! virtual factory is modeled after a real-life flexible packaging manufacturer, simulating the data and operations infrastructure. Vendors will interact with the factory using data from SQL, MQTT, and OPC sources. The factory is divided into operational areas (e.g., Press → Lamination → Slit → Bag) to provide a realistic manufacturing environment for solution development.
?
Functional Specification for Tulip’s ProveIt! Demonstration
Introduction?
The Functional Specification document serves as a detailed plan that outlines how each vendor will integrate their solution into the ProveIt! virtual factory. It describes the problem being solved, the technical requirements, and the steps necessary to complete the integration. This document will be used to guide the development of each solution, ensuring alignment with the ProveIt! virtual factory architecture and integration points. Vendors will collaborate with the technical committee to complete this document prior to the conference, using it as a reference throughout the development process. The Functional Specification ensures that every aspect of the solution, from data flow to system interactions, is well-defined.?
Functional Specification Template?
1. Vendor Information?
o Company Name: Tulip?
o Primary Contact: Erica Jordan ?
Solution Overview:?
Tulip, the leader in frontline operations, is helping companies around the world equip their workforce with connected apps– leading to higher quality work, improved efficiency, and end-to-end traceability across operations. With Tulip’s cloud-based platform, those closest to operations can take advantage of composability and edge connectivity to digitally transform processes, guide operators, track production, and gain a real-time, holistic view of operations. ?
Companies of all sizes and across industries, including complex manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices, have implemented composable solutions with Tulip’s platform to solve some of the most pressing challenges in operations: error-proofing processes and boosting productivity with guided workflows, capturing and analyzing real-time data, and continuously improving operations.
?
2. Problem Definition?
o What specific manufacturing problem will your solution address??
Kitting/Staging
Reduce downtime and increase performance by assisting water spiders in fetching the correct material for staging based on the production plan.? ?
Machine Terminal
????????Provide operators with a unified interface for managing operations at their work cell. Metrics, Worker guidance, Alerts, Defect Tracking? ?
?Machine Checklist
Operational checklist with guidance that pairs with the machine terminal. ?
o Why is solving this problem critical for manufacturers??
Kitting: In a high variant operation with a bottleneck like this factory, it’s crucial that the right material is staged based on the production schedule, so as to not impact productivity. Operators who are kitting and staging material need to know what is next to be picked, where to pick it, and where to stage it. Water spiders need to alert production if material qty is insufficient to satisfy the WO. Operators should have this information at their fingertips, and it should dynamically update as production does. ?
Communication and transactional waste. Ability to react to problems in real time. Streamline transactional waste.? ?
Machine Terminal: Operators should have all of the information they need to do their job at their fingertips. Supervisors should know the state of their operations in real time. State includes operators and equipment.
3. Solution Description?
o Describe how your solution will integrate with the ProveIt! virtual factory.?
We will pull production orders from the Database. We will pull current values (both analytic and functional) from the UNS. We will provide a holistic view of operations to the UNS ?
领英推荐
o What technologies (software, hardware, tools) will you use??
Tulip ?
o Will you be leveraging any third-party tools or services??
Not as of yet. We may partner with other companies at Proveit ?
o Include a high-level overview of your system architecture.
?
4. Data Requirements?
o What data will your solution require from the virtual factory??
Production orders, Equipment status and job information, Material warehouse information. ?
o What MQTT topics, SQL data points, or OPC endpoints will you be interacting with??
TBD ?
o What new data will your solution generate, and how will this data be published back to the Unified Namespace??
Holistic metrics on work cells, Water spider activity, Contextualized alerts and downtime reasons. ?
5. Integration Points?
o How will your solution connect to the following virtual factory systems: MQTT (HiveMQ Broker) & SQL (PostgreSQL Database):? ?
o Describe any specific connection or protocol configurations required for your solution.?
Standard configurations are sufficient ?
6. Functional Requirements?
o List the key functional requirements of your solution (e.g., real-time monitoring, control signals, etc.).
o How will your solution’s functions interact with the virtual factory's processes?? ?
7. Testing and Validation?
o How will you test your solution to ensure it is functioning as expected within the virtual factory??
We will test on simulated data from the UNS ?
o What validation criteria will you use to measure success (e.g., correct data flow, real-time feedback)??
Ideally user testing, we will made adjustments in real time. We will compare calculated metrics with benchmarks in the UNS ?
8. Timeline and Milestones?
o 16 weeks before the conference: Functional Specification completed. o 1-16 weeks before the conference: Development and testing of the solution.?
Version 1 to be completed by Jan 6 ?
o 1 week before the conference: Final review and validation.? ?
9. Presentation Details?
o How will you present your solution during the conference??
We will walk through the build and deployment process, the improvements made on existing system, and the value of additional data we provide to the UNS for other solutions to build on top of. ?
o What real-world manufacturing problem will you demonstrate solving? o How long will it take to deploy your solution in a real manufacturing setting??
Under 3 months ?
o What is the estimated cost of implementing this solution for a manufacturer??
Highly dependent on the number of active work cells (SaaS pricing based on monthly active interfaces)
?
"Simplifying Digital Solutions for Manufacturers | Proudly Leading CAD-IT Australia"
3 周If you can't attend the Provelt Conference in Dallas and you're from Australia or New Zealand then give us at CAD-IT Australia Pty Ltd a shout - we can show you how Tulip Interfaces can easily digitize and streamline your manufacturing processes.