Virtual reality has transformed design process for Eden Prairie-based Tennant

After Tennant figured out how to keep its plants open during the pandemic, it had a second problem to solve.

The company’s designers aren’t all in the same place. Neither are its customers, and sharing pen-and-paper designs isn’t easy on a video call.

Video game technology gave the company a way to move forward over Zoom, and it worked so well, Tennant is still using the technique.

John Ickes, Tennant’s director of design and innovation, and his team had been experimenting with virtual reality headsets and electronic whiteboards to share hologram-type designs for its scrubbers and robotic floor cleaners.

The process worked so well, it’s now permanently part of the process.

And it allowed the team to design its latest design in a year, with what Ickes calls “speed to confidence.”

Since 2018, Tennant has been leading the floor maintenance industry with the release of robotic floor cleaners. In April it introduced its latest, a midsized autonomous mobile robotic (AMR) floor cleaner, the X6 ROVR and its XC1 docking station.

George Tennant started the company in 1870 as a Minneapolis woodworking business. It evolved over the years into a wood-flooring and flooring supplies company and eventually into a one of the leading manufacturers of commercial and industrial floor cleaning equipment.

Now headquartered in Eden Prairie, Tennant made $83.7 million in 2024. Sales increased 3.5% to $1.3 billion.

Over the previous five years Tennant has spent an average of 3% of its total revenue on research and development. In 2024, it was a record $43.8 million as R&D spending increased to 3.5% of total revenue.

“It’s our intention to maintain a higher level of R&D spending because its core to our growth strategy,” said Patrick Schottler, Tennant’s chief marketing and technology officer.

Schottler said the R&D is tied to Tennant’s overall growth strategy to increase revenue 3% to 5% annually, with new products driving 1% to 2% of that growth each year.

“A key element of our growth strategy is new product innovation, and a key element of that new product innovation is AMR,” Schlotter said.

With 11 manufacturing campuses around the world, Tennant has a direct sales and service model that keeps it close to customers in over 100 countries.

It’s an advantage the company utilizes when developing new products including robotic and AMR floor cleaning machines.

Tennant launched its first robotic floor cleaning machine, the T7AMR Scrubber, in 2018. It’s a machine that can be operated manually or robotically. A year ago, the company introduced X4 ROVR, its first fully autonomous robotic machine designed to be more maneuverable in order to clean floors at smaller retail locations.

The X6 ROVR is a larger version of the machine that can be used in big-box stores.

“It’s not uncommon for products of this size and complexity to have a two- to three-year development cycle, and we brought the X6 to market one year after the X4,” Schottler said.

Tennant was able to accelerate the development of the X6 ROVR and XC1 docking station because the design teams at Tennant have embraced new digital design tools.

Ickes, who joined Tennant in 2006 as a principal designer and became director of Tennant’s director of design and innovation in 2022, has fully embraced the new design tools at Tennant.

And he’s been recognized for what he’s done at Tennant. Ickes has won two International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) and a dozen Good Design awards sponsored by the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, including one for the X4 ROVR.

Ickes used some virtual reality headsets to develop the X4 ROVR, which is designed for smaller retail and convenience stores. With the X6 ROVR, he was all in with the new digital tools.

“Thankfully, when COVID ended, we all come back to the office,” Ickes said. But the virtual reality headsets, digital whiteboards and other collaborative tools stayed.

“That genie was out of the bottle. It was just too good to think we were going to go back to the way we were doing it before,” said Ickes, who earned an advertising degree at Michigan State University and later a bachelor’s in industrial design from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit.

He spent several years working in the auto industry and as a design consultant.

The collaboration tools also allowed Tennant to connect designers and engineers in its other geographic locations, including Europe and China, and with Brain Corp., a California company that provides Tennant with the robotic, sensor and navigation technologies for its AMR machines.

“We are beginning to draw and explore in virtual reality,” Ickes said. “So we are getting away from designing in two dimensions to designing in three dimensions.”

Ickes started his career with pen-on-paper design, and he says that drawing skill is still fundamental to a designer’s ability to communicate ideas quickly. The skills haven’t changed but the tools have evolved.

Now Ickes and his teams can create a virtual prototype far faster than a physical one and quickly tweak the design without having to build a new prototype.

“The technology increases our speed to confidence,” Ickes said. “Because we get there really fast and can get confident. We haven’t built anything, but we can all see it.”

The virtual models can also do a better job of informing nontechnical people than through a set of drawings and blueprints.

Tennant is keen on its robotics program because it solves a key customer problem, which is labor. It’s hard to find people to do cleaning jobs.

Tennant’s strategy is to automate the cleaning process, and the X6 ROVR and the XC1 help customers do that.

“As organizations continue to face staffing shortages, automating routine cleaning tasks provides a clear and proven path to operational efficiencies,” said Dave Huml, president and chief executive of Tennant, said in a news release. “We built the X6 ROVR to tackle this challenge — delivering dependable, autonomous performance across large-scale and complex environments, so cleaning teams can stay focused on higher-impact work.”

One of the problems with rechargeable machines is that workers sometimes forget to plug a machine back in to recharge. Essentially leaving the product dead for the next cleaning crew.

The X6 knows when its battery is running low and will automatically navigate itself back to its XC1 charging station. Once the charging is complete the rest of the cleaning cycle can continue by restarting the process remotely.

“We’re delivering a much more consistent cleaning because now that machine is going to be available because the software is not going to forget to guide the machine back to the charging station to charge the battery,” Schottler, the chief marketing and technology officer, said.