Customer case
Machines built from thousands of parts, bills of material up to eight levels deep, and demand that keeps moving. After go live with SAP S4/HANA, Tennant needed to know which production orders can actually be build — and what was missing on the rest. Prototype in one week, live in one month.
Industrial cleaning equipment · founded 1870 · ~4,500 employees
Tennant builds advanced cleaning machines, in standard configurations and to customer-specific requirements. Together with a constantly changing supply and demand situation, that raises a complex question on the factory floor: what do we need to build based on customer priority, and can we make it?
A single machine can carry thousands of parts across a bill of material up to eight levels deep. Sub-assemblies are manufactured in one plant and shipped on to others for final assembly, and to warehouses for customer service and repairs — so availability changes every hour of the day. On top of that sit long component lead times, shifting market demand, tenders, and customer-specific configurations that change what a machine consists of.
Assembly capacity is limited, which makes the release decision the one that matters: only orders with high customer priority and no missing parts should reach the line. Everything else creates a shortage halfway through a build.
Answering that for one order means walking the structure, the stock and the incoming supply. Answering it for every open and planned order, and again tomorrow when demand has moved, is more than a planner's day contains. What Tennant needed was that answer standing ready — and, where the answer was no, the list of parts that were missing and the date they would arrive.
The scenario-based application provides us with the opportunity to optimize our production planning while maintaining the agility needed to support a dynamic business environment. The Accelerate2Value team has been incredibly responsive and collaborative, consistently listening to our requirements while providing valuable insights and recommendations that drive meaningful results.
Clear to Build is a planner's tool: it shows where things stand, and opens up the detail behind a shortage. It lets a decision to solve a shortage be tried before it is made.
Clear to Build calculates a status per order from current stock and expected supply. It shows whether stock is available and available for this particular order; whether the order could be built by taking stock from one of lower priority; and, where parts fall short, exactly which ones, when planned supply arrives and where it is coming from — all of it calculated on Tennant's own ERP data.
A planner can run different scenarios by committing production orders or uncommitting them, and Clear to Build shows the effects of each.
Richard and Nanne quickly bridged our reporting knowledge gap, providing expert guidance and collaborative working sessions that transformed our vision into a practical, user-friendly solution.
Clear to Build increases productivity, both for the planner and for the factory. Fewer factory stops, better customer satisfaction.
From day one, planners got better insights into their production planning. That changes four things day to day:
All if it based on Tennant's own ERP data.
I am very fond of the CTB tool. Whether I'm doing simple part-by-part planning or pulling data for reporting purposes, the CTB has a means to easily extract the data. Having that planning data easily accessible has shaved hours off my weekly planning.
No specification phase and no big-bang release — a prototype to prove the idea, then working software every week.
Tennant explained the challenge; a working prototype on their own data followed within a week. The project started with one objective: live in July.
Weekly sprints, cloud deployment, testing and first trial usage — with user feedback landing as improvements in the next sprint.
Version 1.0 live for a first group of users, on the objective set two months earlier.
Rollout to the wider user community, with improvements continuing alongside it.
On the IT side the project stayed straightforward: no new platform to adopt, no data leaving Tennant's environment, and a standard integration with SAP S/4HANA.
Clear to Build was deployed into Tennant's own cloud environment, inside their tenant and under their identity and access management. That happened during the project rather than after it — the first version users tried was already running where the productive version would run, so go-live was a matter of opening it up to more people rather than moving it anywhere.
The integration with SAP S/4HANA was equally straightforward. Clear to Build reads what it needs — material master data, bills of material, stock, production and planned orders, and incoming supply — and calculates on top of that. It writes nothing back: S/4HANA stays the single source of truth, and the tool stays a lens on it.
From an IT project, deployment, and security perspective, working with Richard and his team was a truly positive experience. They delivered a high-quality solution in a remarkably short timeframe while working within Tennant's existing cloud, security, and SAP landscape. Their collaborative approach, technical expertise, and focus on business outcomes made the implementation seamless and low-risk. The result was not only a successful deployment, but also a strong partnership built on trust, responsiveness, and shared commitment to success.
Cleaning equipment for industrial and commercial use — scrubbers, sweepers, ride-on, walk-behind and robotic machines, plus the parts and service that keep them running.
Customer-specific applications for the business-critical processes standard software does not cover — starting from the process rather than the technology.
Your turn
Every manufacturer has a process its standard software leaves half-covered, and a spreadsheet somewhere doing the rest. An intake takes a couple of days and a prototype about a week — after that you know exactly what you are buying.