MRP – OM in the News

Clorox Expecting Major Supply Chain Improvements with ERP Implementation

Clorox expects to begin realizing gains from migrating its U.S. supply chain to a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with expected productivity improvements through more efficient planning and lower inventory levels.

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a software platform that integrates core business processes like finance, HR, manufacturing, supply chain, and sales into a single centralized hub for shared access and streamlined decision making, lessening the need for departmental spreadsheets.

Clorox

By James Kirby Easterling|2026-09-27T03:28:56+00:00September 25, 2026|Tags: cost management, digitization upgrades, efficiencies, ERP, optimization|

Multiple Factors Create Auto Industry Aluminum Shortage

A shortage of aluminum is impacting the entire auto industry. Especially impacted are trucks, where aluminum is the key material used in making truck bodies.

The aluminum shortage is attributed to the Iran war, a 50% US tariff, and supplier production outage. Ford, being the auto industry’s biggest aluminum buyer, has the largest exposure in the aluminum shortage, limiting the company’s ability to replenish inventories for downstream retail dealers.

Video Spotlight:

Ford Sees $1.3B Tariff Refund, But […]

By Anita Lee-Post, Ph.D.|2026-06-29T04:02:51+00:00June 28, 2026|Tags: downstream suppliers, global supply chain management, shortage, supply chain disruption, upstream suppliers|

Starbucks Implements Inventory AI for Inventory Counting

Starbucks has implemented the NomadGo Inventory AI in over 11,000 company-owned stores in North America.

The new system streamlines Starbucks’ inventory counting, improving operational efficiency and accuracy by increasing count frequency and inventory accuracy while reducing count time.

Video Spotlight:

How automated counting helps Starbucks partners focus more on craft, coffee and customers (Sept 2, 2025, Starbucks Coffee)
Starbucks & NomadGo: How AI Transformed Inventory Across 11,300 Stores | FSTEC 2025 (Sept 25, 2025, NomadGo Inventory […]

By Lisa M. Spencer|2025-11-09T06:36:27+00:00November 9, 2025|Tags: artificial intelligence, efficiency, inventory counting, inventory management, job design|

Amazon AWS Outage Illustrates Outsourcing Risk

AWS, Amazon’s cloud service, hosts applications and provides computing power, data storage and other digital services to companies around the world.

An outage at AWS’s northern Virginia cluster on October 20, 2025, prevented applications from finding the correct address for AWS’s database to store user information and other critical data.

The disruption caused outages across websites and platforms that use AWS’s cloud infrastructure. The downtime translated to “millions in lost productivity and revenue” for thousands of companies from food delivery to airline […]

By Anita Lee-Post, Ph.D.|2025-11-07T08:59:27+00:00November 7, 2025|Tags: cloud computing, ERP, resilience, supply chain disruption|