We have areas of our facility that do not have WiFi, unfortunately rendering Tulip unusable. If a feature were to exist where apps are loaded & ran locally on the device and ‘spool’ up any entered user data, it could allow for a data upload once a connection is re-established.
I have been looking for discussion of this topic as well. We have occasional problems with wifi in our shop and we just lose functionality when that happens.
Hey @drew-
This is not an uncommon ask! surprised this was the only thread I could find about it.
This is a tricky thing to do right because there will always be some caveats in a cloud based platform when running offline. A lot of the resources associated with an app could be cached, like its steps, photos, videos, trigger etc, and we could even spool stuff like completions and reload those when connectivity is reestablish.
The caveats start coming into play when talking about dynamically changing data…
Imaging for a second you have an app used at a number of assembly stations to track progress on an order. all of those app instances are decrementing the required count on the entire order. One station being offline means it can’t interact with that shared record (the overall order), and this could cause massive overproduction you wouldn’t have visibility to, until too late. The same goes for app changes while a station is offline, what if a column is removed while a station is offline, now on reconnect it wont be able to back populate its data into that table successfully.
These are just 2 of the hundreds or thousands of ways offline can get tricky to implement correctly. This is something we think about how to approach regularly, because it such a common ask, and it may be something we spend a huge chunk of time building out the capabilities to support it in the future, but it is a pretty gigantic undertaking.
Our perception as a product team is that internet is not dissimilar to the energy grid 100 years ago. 100 years ago the grid wasn’t 100% reliable, and certainly wasn’t everywhere, but as dependance grows, so does adoption and reliability. The advantages of a cloud based solution outweigh the adoption pain as manufacturing facilities connect to the grid.
Thank you for the reply Pete. Yeah, I can’t imagine the difficulty with trying to maintain proper data offline until a connection returns. I definitely have plans to work on our wifi connections and reliability, but I was just looking for a way to keep production slow downs from happening in the short term. We just started implementing Tulip less than a month ago, and I am working hard to not have it be a burden to anyone. Thanks again.
Hey @drew-
Totally understand that pain. I came from a Tulip customer who ended up adding ~300+ ethernet drops around their 160k sqft facility for this very reason, safe to say it made the process more drawn out than if they had the existing infrastructure. Throwing up a few access points would have been a whole lot cheaper and easier but Wifi was a no-go in their highly regulated industry.
As a quick win to just prove out viability and value before going down the road of big infrastructure changes, I know of a few customers who have throw a few wifi extenders around their facility to fill those gaps in their network for ~$30 a pop.
Always appreciate the feedback!
Pete
Just want to add onto this thread rather than creating a new one - another use case for this (and our use case) is just facilities in locations with very slow / intermittent internet on the supply side. There’s enough internet to use Tulip but uploading photos is quite slow. It would be nice if there were certain parts of Tulip that could be stored as local / on-device data that then could be uploaded upon reaching a certain “conclusion point” of the app, when the operator is perhaps doing some other action in the physical world, they could just wait for Tulip to batch-upload the data at that point, without having to wait for Tulip and thus slowing down their process. In our case it is photos, but it could of course extend to files, or even simpler items like variables that you are then storing in a table. Of course app construction would get more complicated for the average user, so maybe this whole idea falls into the realm of custom widgets.
Hey @Ethan -
Thanks for throwing another use case in the mix for offline mode support! If I had to guess, this would take a sizable chunk of our engineering resources on the timescale of a year (minimum) to implement, and not something we have any immediate plans to address, but something that is absolutely on our radar as we continue to grow.
Pete
Totally understandable Pete! Maybe I can get these guys a Starlink connection…
Just had another thought on this that could be an easier stop gap- in the case of uploading photos, could we get some kind of progress wheel or something? Right now the screen just hangs for a couple of seconds looking like no progress is being made before the photo starts loading in vertical in horizontal bars.
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Hey @Ethan -
Good call, I wrote up a request for this, let me get with the team and understand what it would take to implement this.
Pete
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