Hello,
Lately I have been relying on the new App Diagram functionality for understanding and explaining a manufacturing process with new stakeholders. I am really, really excited about this functionality. It is a huge piece of Tulip’s transformative vision to have manufacturing processes defined by the processing application, instead of SOPs which never quite line up. The ability to quickly dissect a manufacturing process from a well labeled and auto-diagramming MES system is revolutionary and AFAIK there is no other offering coming close here.
However, the functionality seems to have quite a few bugs and oversights (some detailed below). I would just like to stress the importance of accuracy of this tool because of the above sentiment. I know there are a lot of “important” things to work on with the platform, but I worry that if this tool becomes an afterthought for the platform then it is a big miss for the industry. In its current state it is closer to a gimmick… As we all have experienced, if things seem broken we will slowly learn not to trust them and at that point the feature is useless.
Some gaps, but I will probably come back to this thread with more as I find them:
- Some transition blocks just float and there is no indication which step they are coming from.
- Some app steps are appearing with missing arrows as to how they are accessed.
- Some steps with clear transitions to are not appearing.
In my testing with smaller apps, the tool works well, but in actual production apps it has a lot of these missing connections. I understand this is not an easy challenge, and I understand there are likely complex reasons for these bugs. However, in its current state I could not recommend the tool to anyone and I sincerely hope that changes. Please let me know how I can be of assistance in providing specific examples.