I was a consultant and ran IT security years ago at a company that was bought in a hostile takeover for ~$1B which was a significant premium in order to get som

I was a consultant and ran IT security years ago at a company that was bought in a hostile takeover for ~$1B which was a significant premium in order to get some expertise for a special market they didn't have in house. One of the first things the purchaser did was tell the acquired company that they needed to change all their SKUs to match the corporate standard. At least some management at the purchaser knew that the acquired company used SKUs to track batches so they could detect, track and troubleshoot manufacturing and design defects, but apparently thought that standardization was more important. That was far from their only bad decision but within 5 years they'd run their 1B investment down to just the residual value of the IP about 100M. Fitting things into a procrustean bed (standardization) isn't always a good business strategy and inventory management in particular can be more complicated than it looks.