Partnering with Tennant Company to modernize IoT technology

Tennant Company is a global leader with over 150 years of experience designing, manufacturing, and marketing sustainable solutions for commercial and industrial floor cleaning and maintenance. Its core business is in industrial cleaning machines like backpack vacuums, robotic floor scrubbers, and massive riding sweepers for indoor and outdoor use. These machines are hard at work in commercial spaces worldwide, helping Tennant deliver on its mission to create a cleaner, safer, healthier world.

In 2015, Tennant launched an IoT-enabled telemetry system to monitor its equipment remotely. The machines’ data provided information for customer-users, such as location and working efficiency of the equipment and tracking time and duration of use. This data gave Tennant’s customers valuable insight into the efficiency and effectiveness of the equipment as well as their cleaning and maintenance regimes.

As the system aged and external technologies improved, Tennant knew it needed an update. The company teamed up with us to design and implement a solution, not just to bring its systems up to date but also to build for the future.

Tennant began updating its hardware and its back-end platform in 2019. But it still needed a user-friendly front-end application that could sort and visualize the vast amount of collected data while making it accessible and actionable. The company knew it had to expand its existing capabilities to execute the project and realize that goal.

Our initial work helped Tennant transform its system, enhancing the value it provides its customers. The focus was on presenting the data in a scalable, reliable, and low-latency way. We also enabled Tennant to envision an entirely new user experience for the technology. By paying specific attention to UI/UX and thinking through edge cases and quality assurance, we added genuine value for Tennant’s users without skyrocketing costs. 

As the project progressed, it naturally evolved. And as our team proved its skills and capabilities, Tennant brought us on board for back-end development, adding more value and deepening the collaborative relationship.

We know that one size definitely does not fit all. We assembled a team with precisely the skills and capacity Tennant needed. Business analysis, UI/UX design and development, and quality assurance meshed seamlessly with the company’s in-house talent.  

In previous work with other offshore teams, Tennant found that large time differences create significant team communication and collaboration challenges. Guaranteed daily schedule overlap with our team enabled near-constant communication, real-time sharing and problem solving, and the productivity the company was seeking. 

Tennant already sees the positive impacts of the upgrade. Its system was an innovation when it was introduced in 2015. Moving to newer technologies and a cloud-based solution has had a significant internal impact, while allowing the company to also deliver a better experience for its customers.

Our work with Tennant isn’t just about addressing today’s needs. Looking ahead, the company sees this solution as the key to predictive maintenance, helping customer-users maximize ROI by keeping equipment reliability as high as possible while minimizing upkeep costs.