LTS 8 - August 2022

Announcements
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These are the product updates in the Long Term Support Release 8 of the Tulip platform.

LTS 8 is available now.

To read more about Tulip’s GxP capabilities, visit the support article here

Who’s Impacted

These updates will be available for accounts that have elected to upgrade every 3-6 months with Long Term Releases, rather than the regular biweekly release. This is more common for Tulip customers in the life sciences, aerospace, defense, and other regulated industries. If an organization does not utilize LTS with Tulip, then these features have already been rolled out over the past few months.

What’s New

Tulip is excited to release LTS 8, our long-term support software update for customers in regulated industries and life sciences. LTS 8 includes new features that our GxP customers can use to streamline compliance and scale more effectively across an organization quickly and securely.

Themes

  • Compliance Made Easy

Streamline compliance with GxP-compliant e-signatures, custom footers for device history records (DHRs), audit trails for tables, and export machine attribute data as a CSV file.

  • Accelerate Value and Scale Across Global Operations

Accelerate digital transformation across your organization by creating and standardizing custom widgets, enabling employees to work in their preferred languages and more.

Compliance Made Easy

The burden of compliance is increasing as regulatory organizations raise standards for companies to document what occurs during their operations, when it happened, and who performed the action.

The features developed in LTS 8 intend to close gaps in their audit processes and reduce the burden of compliance for our customers in highly regulated environments. By improving documentation capabilities and automating data capture for audit trails, our customers will be able to streamline compliance, increase productivity, and ship products faster.

In LTS 8, we have updates to documentation capabilities that provide contextual information and features that automate audit trails.

Enhancements to e-Signatures

With an update to the e-signature capabilities in Tulip, customers can now use a widget to quickly and securely collect GxP-compliant e-signatures in all use cases. The signature widget gives app builders the flexibility to request signatures multiple times at any step of multistep workflows, governs precisely who has the ability to sign and allows end users to easily add comments for increased traceability. Users can also print signatures from the Record History widget to improve documentation. These e-signatures are GxP-compliant and were specifically developed with FDA’s CFR 21 Part 11 and Europe’s GMP Annex 11 in mind.

Custom Footers for Device History Records

In addition to e-signatures, customers will be able to add custom footers on device history records (DHRs) to provide contextual information for audits

To automate audit trails and reduce the burden of completing tedious tasks, customers can easily find an audit trail for tables and connectors and export machine attributes and actions to a CSV file.

Accelerate Value and Scale Across Global Operations

Updates in LTS 8 will make it even faster and easier for our customers to improve operations across their organization.

Multilingual

Tulip apps now support multiple language translations within an individual app, making it easier to deploy apps across facilities, and supporting operators in their native language. This update will enable engineers to add translations within an app in 8 supported languages.

Plugins

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Another new capability released in LTS 8 is plugins, including Custom Widgets. Plugins are powerful, customizable components that extend an application’s functionality and enable teams to solve challenges in their day-to-day processes. Tulip has out-of-the-box widgets in our library that help organizations get started quickly, but organizations are also able to quickly edit and create their own custom widgets in Tulip’s low-code environment.

In-product app library

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To further enable scalability, access to Tulip Library apps from within the Tulip App Editor allows them to get started sooner.

Where Used Connectors

With information on where connectors are used, app developers can quickly identify which connectors are driving which applications.

Additionally, customers will be able to reuse Node-RED nodes across multiple devices and migrate workspaces easily with updates in LTS 8.

How do I learn more about LTS 8?

Tulip customers interested in the full release notes should inquire with their customer success manager.

2 Likes
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Great!!! Can’t wait to have our instance upgraded.

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Regarding the new e-signature widget. How do I retrieve the signature information that can be retrieved for review or auditing once the app is completed and closed. Also not clear on the purpose of data to sign and table record to sign purpose fields for the widget. I assume the signature is certifiying that the variable or table record is what the signature is for and not necessarily everything being displayed on the step or the app so far.

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Hey @Attaboy -

To review the data-

  1. Insert the ‘Record History’ Widget. This will allow you to map to a placeholder, and the widget will include all changes to all record values, along with any e-signatures.
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  2. This toggle will filter to just signed data
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Talked to our head of quality a bit about the Data to sign meaning, this is what she said-

The intention of data to sign (whether it’s a variable or an entire table record) is to provide context for the signature. It provides specificity to what the signature is intended to cover. While not explicitly required by 21 CFR Part 11, it is expected now with electronic tools. In the paper world that context was provided by a document that had boundaries (think page 1 of 20, 2 of 20, etc…). Signatures that came at the end of a document typically inferred “everything before this point”. This is less obvious with digital tools. The data to sign field now provides that.

Hope this helps-
Pete

1 Like
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Pete,

Does this require me to add a table column to store the electronic signature and to add that data manipulate trigger to the electronic signature widget? I can see that the signature object is saved in the app completion table automatically, just not clear on how to store it in the table where we store the app data. There doesn’t seem to be a variable that is linked to the signature widget that can manipulate.

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@Attaboy, @Pete_Hartnett I’m interested to know how you resolved this. thank you.

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To use it properly such that the signature is saved in the table record history you must assign at least one table value for the “Tulip record to sign”. In my testing I have an interactive table that I select the row which then sets the placeholder and also loads the value of the tulip record that will appear when you click on the sign button. In that same step I also have the Record History widget showing so I can see what is showing up in the history for that record. After you sign, the signature information did not show up for me right away. It only appeared after I selected a different row in the interactive table and then came back to the original row. I assume it needed to reset or update. The signature information is shown at the top of the history record. I haven’t tried to include multiple fields from multiple tables to see if the signature information shows up in the multiple table records. I also assume this wouldn’t work if it was just a variable and not a table value that is being signed because the variable is not associated with a table record where the history record widdget can be used.

The signature information is not saved in a column in the table like a variable using data manipulated to stored it in the table. Only way to see it is using the Record history widget. It would of being nicer if it was saved and accessible in the table record.

1 Like
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See the open feature request: Option to save the Signature data (user,name, date) in a Tulip table

Signature storage and access are sensitive in regulated environments, which adds some complexity and creates issues with treating signature the same as other fields. Most notably, these signatures must be immutable. Right now there isn’t a mechanism to make a table record field immutable (like completions). This is the driving mechanism for the split of Completions and Tables, but is something we are looking to better unify in the coming year.