Tidal Software announced that its customer, Tennant Company, has successfully completed a comprehensive audit of global SAP transaction usage using Tidal Transaction Analyzer. According to Tennant, the Tidal solution greatly simplifies the auditing process and enhances security by providing a clear picture of transaction usage.

Tennant Company is a manufacturer of indoor and outdoor environmental cleaning solutions and specialty floor coatings. From a security standpoint, Tennant needed a clear and specific understanding of which transactions were being executed on a daily basis and by whom, in order to restructure and update their transaction approvals on a global basis. The complete and accurate picture of transaction usage provided by Tidal Transaction Analyzer allowed Tennant to streamline their transaction approval process.

Tidal's Transaction Analyzer provides Tennant with all the transaction information they need at their fingertips. They can access it at any time to determine if a given transaction is really needed, or what impact removing it would have on users who are assigned to it.

"Without Transaction Analyzer you are truly working with a blank page not really knowing what a particular user needs," said Mary Burdorf, Tennant's security administrator. "With Transaction Analyzer we can go to a specific business process area, say customer service, and see that they have access to 400 transactions. We can also see that everyone in the department has only executed 50 transactions. That allows us to clean and modify access completely within the actual rules and requirements of those users."

Another important requirement for accurately streamlining SAP transactions is the global nature of Tennant Company. "We work in the main office here in Golden Valley, Minnesota, but Tennant's operations are very global," said Burdorf. "We have offices in Europe, Asia, and Australia as well as the America's. They all use SAP, and they are all in the same system. Tennant has a centralized SAP instance servicing the global organization.

"Without Tidal Transaction Analyzer, the global authorization role redesign process would have been overwhelming," continued Burdorf. "The total redesign took about a year and a half to complete with myself and two contractors working on it...Without using Tidal Transaction Analyzer, it would have taken at least twice as long, and I cringe trying to think of what tools we would have had to use to get the task completed at all."

According to Burdorf, the most important thing about the data generated by Tidal Transaction Analyzer is that it clearly showed that none of the transactions they would lose would prevent them from doing their jobs. The tool allowed the security team to not only see how many times a person had executed a transaction, but also when they did it to see a calendar pattern of need. They could also see when a particular transaction executed a particular program. This additional level of detail allowed them to include some specific customization of the approval process.

"Thanks to Tidal Transaction Analyzer we were able to complete this massive reorganization of transaction approvals in a very reasonable timeframe," said Burdorf. "But probably the best thing about it was that Transaction Analyzer data provided us with the credibility we needed when dealing with company department heads."