Building on Innovation

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. When this innovative company needed help updating its remote equipment monitoring and data-visualization capabilities, it partnered with MentorMate to take its systems to the next level. Tennant’s 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 Company 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 provided Tennant’s customers with 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. “Our solution got a little long in the tooth and needed to be brought up to this generation’s technology,” says Nayeem Ahmed, Principal Systems and Data Architect with Tennant. MentorMate partnered with Ahmed to design and implement a solution, not just to bring Tennant’s systems up to date but also to build for the future.

Visualizing Success

Starting in 2019, Tennant began updating its hardware and its back-end platform. But the company 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. Ahmed knew he needed to expand Tennant’s existing capabilities to execute the project and realize that goal.

MentorMate’s 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 the MentorMate team proved its skills and capabilities, Tennant brought us on board for back-end development, adding more value and deepening the collaborative relationship.

Flexible Teams, Seamless Collaboration

At MentorMate, 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. 

“With my data architecture and software development background, working with the technical leaders at MentorMate directly was a big plus — and a requirement for me,” says Ahmed. His background and experience also meant that Tennant was ready to jump right into our Agile framework and make things happen.

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

Unlocking the Future

Tennant Company 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 Tennant to also deliver a better experience for its customers.

“Being able to expose this IoT data in a quick, low-latency, reliable way is driving growth for us,” says Ahmed. “Unlocking data is hard because you don’t know who needs what. You don’t know how to bring a lot of these sources together. So the impact on Tennant was massive. We’ve seen many new users coming into this new solution and taking full advantage of it.”

MentorMate’s 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.