Tennant Company makes industrial floor cleaning equipment. Solid business. Publicly traded. About $1.2 billion in annual revenue. The kind of company that runs on operational discipline.
In 2023, Tennant started consolidating eight legacy ERP systems onto one SAP cloud platform. The project was budgeted at $75 million. By the time the system went live in November 2025, the total investment had reached $98 million.
Within days of go-live, Tennant could not process customer orders. Could not ship product. Could not service existing accounts. For three weeks, the operation was functionally paralyzed.
The result: $30 million in lost sales. Remediation costs over $20 million—against an original plan of $5 million. A 23 percent single-day stock drop. A securities fraud investigation that is still open as of this week.
The Dashboard Said Green
Here is the part that should keep every CEO up at night. The ERP went live. The system was operational. From a technology standpoint, the implementation was complete. The vendor delivered. The cutover happened on schedule.
But “live” and “working” are not the same thing.
The system was live. The operation was not. The technology was deployed on top of eight legacy processes that had never been reconciled into one. Nobody had done the work of mapping the actual operation—the workarounds, the manual checks, the tribal knowledge that kept those eight systems producing results for years.
When the new system went live, it ran against the process it was configured for. The operation ran against the process that existed. Those two things were not the same. And the gap between them shut down order fulfillment for one of the largest cleaning equipment manufacturers in the world.
Why This Keeps Happening
Tennant is not an outlier. They are the pattern made visible. Most ERP failures do not make the news because most companies absorb the cost quietly—higher rework, slower delivery, gradual margin erosion that shows up as a growth problem rather than a technology problem.
The pattern is always the same.
A company outgrows its systems. Leadership approves a platform investment. The vendor configures the technology based on how the company describes its operation. But how the company describes its operation and how the operation runs are two different things.
They have been two different things for years. The gap just never mattered this much—until the new system required the real operation and the documented operation to be the same.
Technology does not create this gap. Technology reveals it. And the faster the technology, the faster the reveal.
The $75 Million Question Nobody Asked
Is our operation ready for the system we are about to deploy—or are we deploying a system on top of the operation we have been working around for years?
Tennant spent $98 million answering the wrong question. They asked: which platform will consolidate our systems? The question they needed to ask first was: what does our operation look like when eight systems are running it, and what needs to change before we collapse them into one?
That is the operationalization work. It is not glamorous. It does not show up well in a board deck. But it is the difference between a system that accelerates your operation and a system that accelerates the gap between what your company says it does and what it delivers.
What This Means for Your Next Technology Decision
If you are planning an ERP migration, an AI deployment, or any technology investment that touches how your company operates—ask these three questions before the contract is signed:
First: Can a new hire run each affected process from what is documented today? If the answer is no, the technology will collide with the undocumented version.
Second: Where does the operation depend on one person’s knowledge? Those are the processes that will break first under a new system—because the system cannot inherit what was never written down.
Third: Are we deploying this technology on the operation we have, or the operation we described to the vendor? If those are different—and they almost always are—the gap is where the failure will happen.
Tennant’s ERP worked. Their operation was not ready for it. That sentence describes $2.3 trillion in failed digital transformation globally, every year.
Find the gap before the technology does
The 5-Minute Scorecard at https://cassidineconsulting.com/scorecard/ measures the distance between the operation you have and the operation your strategy requires. Five minutes. Free. It shows you where to look before you spend another dollar on technology that accelerates the wrong thing.
— The Operations Nerd