Intro: You're listening to Behind the Ops presented by Tulip 

Madi: Russ, did you get a haircut? 

Russ: I got a haircut and now that I'm a dad, I'm super tempted to say I got them all . 

Madi: Did you go to an actual mall or was it like a super cut situation? 

Russ: I don't touch super cuts. Are we recording this? This is important.

I don't mess with super cuts. I have curly hair bordering on wavy, depending on the humidity and I wear it relatively long and super cuts mostly can't hang with long-ish curly men's hair. So I stay away. 

Madi: What do, what do you mean by mall cut? 

Russ: No. I said I got them all cut. Did you get a haircut? No, I got them all cut.

Madi: I thought you said you got the mall cut like the dad haircut version of the Rachel. And so it's like, what does that mean? 

Russ: Welcome to Behind the Haircut.

Madi: Our newest segment. 

Russ: I'm super ready to talk about these Groundbreaker nominees. 

Madi: Why don't you kick us off then? 

Russ: We have the best people that we get to work with.

They make fascinating products. They are deep in the thick of Manufacturing and process engineering and continuous improvement. And they love their jobs and many of them are super open about sharing what makes their jobs interesting and fun. And some of them don't even know how interesting and fun their jobs are.

And every time I look at a list of here are things that our customers, I mean our peers as well, but our customers and coworkers are working on, I get so excited about the amazing stuff that they're working on. And I feel like it's kind of unfair to concentrate it into a couple of of minutes, basically worth of, worth of story when this, a lot of these people, it's like all day, every day they're doing amazing things.

Madi: Yeah. I, I, I definitely would love to just like hear more and talk more about, and to each of the folks that have been submitted for the Groundbreakers program. I think that people who are afraid of citizen development just haven't met or kind of seen what people can really do here, and that once you kind of read the stories or meet the people who are at the frontline making changes, it's a real perspective changer.

Russ: It is. It's a reason for optimism and dare I say happiness, a word that is sometimes not tightly associated with Manufacturing as an industry. 

Madi: So maybe I can talk a little bit about how we're recognizing these folks. So the Groundbreakers program is like a formal way for us to celebrate and tell these stories about power users for Tulip, but more importantly, People who are developing and leading change, transformational change on the shop floor.

And that's like process improvement, culture change. And part of that is they develop and reflect those changes in Tulip as a, as a platform. 

Russ: It's awards, basically. Recognition and awards. 

Madi: Yeah. Yeah. The Emmys of Manufacturing, 

Russ: I was gonna say the Oscars of Manufacturing. 

Madi: So one of us likes music more than the other.

Russ: It's okay. It's the Tony's of Manufacturing. 

Madi: There's one more, right? We got 'em. Emmy's, we left out the TV people. 

Russ: Always a bridesmaid and never a bride or tv. 

Madi: Cool. So, I mean, I feel like every company, every SaaS company now has something like this where they're like, you know, we have awards so that we can kind of promote ourselves by saying that we care about our customers.

What makes this different?

Russ: I don't think we have to talk about ourselves because I think that the customers have stories that are compelling on their own. And I mean, I don't wanna put myself as a every man and say that everyone will find these stories compelling, but I do know, I know a thing or two about storytelling and I know that hearing the how and the who and the what together for these stories. You don't have to talk about the product per se. You're talking about how did a situation where you know, somebody, they came into a place where there was a manual or a paper-based process and maybe they digitized something or maybe they expanded on something.

But the story to tell there is about, you know, an interaction that went from being, you know, potentially rocky because there was something wrong in the process. Cuz there's always something wrong in the process and that is made highly visible by like better sensing and adding cameras and, and adding just all sorts of the tools of process visibility.

And then the piece that, that I think is underappreciated sometimes, particularly in a, in a technical context is there's some sort of a meeting of the minds, where somebody says, Oh, this was the thing, this is what I've been working on. And to them, it's, it's, All the time. So if there's 10 workarounds, well the 10 workarounds are just part of what we do, but then the fresh eyes get on it and the fresh eyes are able to talk about it in a, you know, easily quantifiable manner.

Cuz now we're collecting good data on the process and we all start from here's, here's the areas to improve the process. And then human ingenuity. It gets cranked into high gear and everybody's working together on how do we fix the thing that we just exposed as the thing that is wrong, and then just do that forever.

That's what's thrilling about working in Manufacturing is it can be depressing on, on some hands because you're always stuck in where the problems are. But on the other hand, you never stop solving problems cuz you're always fixing stuff and getting better. 

Madi: Always something interesting to do , and build on.

And I think to your point about, you know, seeing things and, and sharing with other people, there's a lot of knowledge sharing and skills building peer to peer that a lot of the folks we've learned about do. So not only do they solve problems and build systems, but they help other people understand.

Their approaches and just have this like huge impact on other people being able to like, discover and get the same satisfaction that they're discovering from the problem solving. 

Russ: Yeah. And that communication layer is important. So understanding that you can, you can lay something out for a team of, you know, smart, hardworking engineers.

And once you've framed and illustrated the problem and framed and illustrated possible solution sets that like taking an engineering approach to things. In a way that isn't necessarily, you know, it, you're not deep heads down individually in a problem. You're in sort of like this. I mean, it's a, it's an overused example, but it's the Apollo 13, fit the square air filter in the round hole thing where you're, you're doing like creative, hands-on problem solving to make things better.

And that happens in a dynamic space as opposed to in a series kind of like very separated. Oh, the process engineer sits over there at their desk and then the, you know, the machinist is over here. And the machinist has a list of problems that live in their brain, and they basically wait for an engineer or manager to come over and tell 'em that they're going too slow or something.

That's a terrible, dysfunctional way to do things and watching it get kind of like broken apart with this. Basically we have a really, really long list of nominees, and all of them are building that engineering communication and engineering process. It's not just process improvement, but it's sort of like, Process exposure.

And that's a piece of all of Manufacturing engineering that seems like it's been stuck for a long time, and that thread is throughout every single nominee. And you know, to make it broader than us too. It's also, this is the problem set that's getting solved by lots of our competitors and partners and like, this is the interesting problem of the 2020s and the maybe the 2030s that is the exciting thing in manufacturing. 

I think that the phenomenon you're describing is this re-imagining, redefining of what it means to be a frontline engineer and you're kind of moving beyond different lanes and kind of crossing some boundaries of like different roles to like really cover things more holistically.

And I think that's cool, you know, upside change for folks in this career path. 

And there's, you know, maybe not in recent history, but certainly in the history of the industry, there's a tendency towards specialization, specialization, specialization, and getting down to whatever the, the lowest base unit of the thing you can do repetitively and over, I don't know, 40 to 50 years, automation or robotics has helped weed some of that out, but also sort of that never ending pressure on the labor market to say like you have to put the humans to do the thing that humans are best at and complex problem solving, and the things that require more big brain power are the, and that that doesn't necessarily just mean back office brain power, that means all types of brain power and complex reasoning.

Putting that stuff in the hands of the people and augmenting their ability to do that is kind of like the story of the day . 

Madi: I like that you bring up kind of the evolution cuz I, I think it's important to not downplay the past or the ways that engineers have figured out how to solve problems. Even if the techer systems just were difficult for them, like they've been doing this, but taking out, I think the, the lower value and maybe bureaucratic part of problem solving and making it more streamlined is just making it possible to solve more problems in new and interesting ways, which I think is the evolution, and hopefully we see more of that in the future in ways that we don't know what that's gonna look like now. 

Russ: There's a lot of lack of nuance to startups entering industrial spaces. You know, over maybe the last five or 10 years or a little bit more, there's a tendency to say, Why is everything on paper? Why is everything not connected to the internet? Why does the software look this way? We're gonna fix this cause we're gonna bring software to an industrial space .And there's a certain hubris to that, you know, long term it leads to failed projects because you basically have, have somebody that's not respecting what's good about the process and processes exist and they may be highly manual or they may be, I won't say old, I'll say established. Because they're functioning right? Like it works. So we are doing it the way that it works. And why would we, why would we stop doing the thing that we know we can make, For example, we can make parts profitably, like until something comes along that says, this is no longer a profitable way to make these parts.

You know, there are places where there's obvious problems to aim fixes at, but there are also places where you really have to respect why it's working now and taking that Manufacturing engineering approach to things, but then layering new tech on top. And I don't care if that new tech is software or if it's a business process innovation, or if it's a new machine tool or a new grade of carbide fear cutting tools and drill bits or something like that.

All of that is, it's this dynamic engineering thinking, which is what's my problem? How do I break it down into the pieces that can be solved individually and then they kinda like stack into a better bundled fix that will actually be integrated to all the things I'm trying to accomplish. And then like build that back up in a way that that's respectful of, Oh yeah, we're doing this process cuz it works.

Please don't, please don't kill the thing that isn't broken. 

Madi: So how can our listeners hear more of these stories? Like out of the abstract and from or about the people who are, who are doing. 

Russ: This is the teaser . We're here to leave people wanting more. They wanna know who these people are. So follow Tulip on LinkedIn.

We'll announce the, the awards and do the awards ceremony there. We will also host more details on community and tell some stories on community.tulip.co. Where by the way, a lot of the, uh, folks that are nominated spend a great deal of time telling their stories and looking for support and supporting each other.

Um, and then I, I don't wanna make any promises we can't keep, but I want, I want to get some interviews with these folks. I don't care if they win or not. I want every nominee to be a household name in behind the ops land. 

Madi: I want them all to have haircuts named after them. 

Russ: goals. 

Madi: Awesome. Till next time?

Russ: See you next time.

Outro: Behind the Ops is brought to you by Tulip. Connect the people, machines, devices, and systems used in your production and logistics processes with our frontline operations platform. Visit Tulip.Co to learn more. This show is produced by Jasmine Chan and edited by Thom Obarski. If you enjoyed listening, support the show by leaving us a quick rating or review.

It really helps. If you have feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at behindtheops@tulip.co