Tennant automates 100% of AP invoices


Industry
Industrial cleaning equipment industry
Revenue
$1.2 Billion
Employees
44,000
Headquarters
Minnesota, USA
Tennant is a cleaning industry leader with innovative and sustainable solutions for indoor and outdoor cleaning. Headquartered in Minneapolis, the company has 44,000 employees worldwide and over $1bn in global revenue.
Tennant’s global AP challenges
Tennant were struggling to manage a high volume of supplier invoices in a way that permitted both efficient and accurate processing alongside consistent reporting on invoice status, productivity, and cashflow across their global operations. This lack of visibility also presented compliance issues in each of their three regional shared services centers, with little corporate control and difficulty maintaining local regulatory obligations.
To overcome these challenges, the company knew it would need a solution that was flexible enough to accommodate the statutory, regulatory, and cultural issues faced in different regions, while also providing a single processing platform for all supplier invoices to allow for reduced complexity without adversely impacting critical business and IT resources.
Key facts:
- Processing 30,000+ invoices monthly
- Complex global marketplaces with multiple statutory, regulatory, and cultural challenges
- Three shared services centers across Minneapolis, Uden, and Shanghai
Tennant’s transformation approach
By adopting accounts payable automation, Tennant Company aimed to optimize its operations and achieve greater financial control, enabling a seamless and efficient global accounts payable process.
They chose our FS² Accounts Payable solution for its capacity to leverage their existing investment in SAP platforms, its capacity to easily extend, upgrade, and scale to their future needs, and its ability to provide flexibility to meet regional challenges while also providing a unified process for AP globally with a high rate of automation and vastly reduced manual effort.
The result – ROI in less than one year
Tennant’s solution paid for itself in slightly less than a year thanks to its ability to automate the capture even of highly unstructured invoice data via Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In fact, 100% of incoming invoices are now captured using OCR, with 60% submitted electronically and processed without any human intervention at all.
FS² Accounts Payable also provides greater transparency into invoice status, productivity, and working capital status across all shared service centers, and the ability to comply with diverse fiscal and legal requirements across the US, Europe, and APAC without having to substantially deviate from a unified global standard for AP workflows.
Business Need
Tennant is a cleaning industry leader with innovative and sustainable solutions for indoor and outdoor cleaning. Headquartered in Minneapolis, the company has 44,000 employees worldwide and over $1bn in global revenue.
Tennant’s global AP challenges
Tennant were struggling to manage a high volume of supplier invoices in a way that permitted both efficient and accurate processing alongside consistent reporting on invoice status, productivity, and cashflow across their global operations. This lack of visibility also presented compliance issues in each of their three regional shared services centers, with little corporate control and difficulty maintaining local regulatory obligations.
To overcome these challenges, the company knew it would need a solution that was flexible enough to accommodate the statutory, regulatory, and cultural issues faced in different regions, while also providing a single processing platform for all supplier invoices to allow for reduced complexity without adversely impacting critical business and IT resources.
Key facts:
- Processing 30,000+ invoices monthly
- Complex global marketplaces with multiple statutory, regulatory, and cultural challenges
- Three shared services centers across Minneapolis, Uden, and Shanghai
Solution Implemented
Tennant’s transformation approach
By adopting accounts payable automation, Tennant Company aimed to optimize its operations and achieve greater financial control, enabling a seamless and efficient global accounts payable process.
They chose our FS² Accounts Payable solution for its capacity to leverage their existing investment in SAP platforms, its capacity to easily extend, upgrade, and scale to their future needs, and its ability to provide flexibility to meet regional challenges while also providing a unified process for AP globally with a high rate of automation and vastly reduced manual effort.
Results Achieved
The result – ROI in less than one year
Tennant’s solution paid for itself in slightly less than a year thanks to its ability to automate the capture even of highly unstructured invoice data via Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In fact, 100% of incoming invoices are now captured using OCR, with 60% submitted electronically and processed without any human intervention at all.
FS² Accounts Payable also provides greater transparency into invoice status, productivity, and working capital status across all shared service centers, and the ability to comply with diverse fiscal and legal requirements across the US, Europe, and APAC without having to substantially deviate from a unified global standard for AP workflows.