Tennant modernizes its ERP platform to help drive efficiency and growth

What was the challenge?

“We had eight different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems across our territories, which hasn’t been conducive to business growth. We’ve grown through acquisitions and have limited insight into manufacturing costs. For example, evaluating a T500 floor scrubber at various locations can result in different expenditures. We need one global ERP instance with governance, particularly for master data, allowing us to extract credible data to make faster and more informed business decisions.”

Describe the solution delivered by the PwC community of solvers.

“PwC is helping us modernize and harmonize our ERP systems and processes.  First, we finished the design phase and have moved on to our build phase, consolidating multiple legacy ERP systems (including SAP ECC) into one global instance of S/4HANA. The result? We’re improving our business efficiency and decreasing material number ranges from 20 to one. We are also on track to achieve 98% data cleanliness thanks to instituting a global governance process, which will be a great foundation for implementing AI.”

How does the solution blend the strengths of technology and people?

“Together with PwC, we’re taking a human-led, tech-powered approach to this transformation — aiming to make sure that the technology achieves our business goals without getting too complex. Leveraging primarily fit-to-standard processes, and applying them on a global scale, can provide better visibility and the ability for our team to make decisions quickly. Alongside transforming our ERP landscape, we’re working with PwC to redesign our business processes according to Industry Edge leading practices for the manufacturing industry.”

Where or how did innovation and unexpected ways of thinking come into play?

“We’ve already started to derive value from the global instance of S/4HANA by leveraging PwC’s Leading with Insights framework, which features accelerators mapping legacy application sources to SAP S/4HANA. With models for native S/4HANA structures and industry-leading analytics dashboards for real-time insights into finance (working capital and global spend) and supply chain (inventory and goods movement) metrics we’re immediately seeing the benefits without having to wait until the end of the migration.

Previously, we had over 3,000 reports across our ERPs. By redefining our reporting during the design and build phase, PwC is helping us reduce that number by two-thirds, down to less than 500. We look forward to continuing our work together in a single landscape to help streamline acquisitions and enable growth.”