TRI Industries is a non-profit with a specific mission: employing people with disabilities to manufacture laser toner cartridges that are sold commercially and to the federal government. Since 1977, the organization has been providing stable, reliable jobs in Chicago while delivering a quality product to their customers.

Like many businesses that have been operating for decades, some of the company’s supply chain processes and procedures were becoming outdated.

According to Jay Burrell, Vice President and COO at TRI, they even had someone build an inventory replenishment application to provide some much-needed guidance. Although it worked, the system wasn’t as thorough as they needed and it took far too long to use.

“It would take about a half a day to run our inventory levels,” Burrell said.

“It was basically a min-max system. It worked well, but it just couldn’t look at things like lead times. It wouldn’t look at special overstocked inventory. It wouldn’t look at anything that had trending data. We knew there was a better option.”

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