Unit of Measure confusion across varied supply chains is a real problem. Here is an anecdote from past experience. This is from the healthcare sector. Our clie

Unit of Measure confusion across varied supply chains is a real problem. Here is an anecdote from past experience. This is from the healthcare sector. Our client builds and installs systems for supply chain management in hospitals in North America and Europe. Think of hospitals ordering syringes, needles, gloves, implants etc., There are a zillion suppliers providing tons of SKUs and products will have multiple vendors supplying them (for supply risk management). Each product from a supplier also has multiple variants -- for eg: gloves could be in sizes Medium and Large etc., At the point of ordering (eg: the nurses' station) the hospital would have setup a mapping of the logical product SKU (eg: Medium Nitrile gloves) to two or three product item codes specific to each vendor. The hospital's material management system takes care of the local inventory management and reordering. While most of the ordering happens through electronic systems, there are still orders originating through <gasp>faxes</gasp>! It is a small fraction of the total orders placed, but it is non-zero and fulfilling them is critical. Many times, the nurses maintain thick binders full of product catalog listings and ordering procedures specific to the hospital's preferred/certified vendors. Most of the time, the exception process is to hand fill a form and fax the order to the vendor designated fax number. (Yes, it still happens in 2022/23). In the backend, the faxed order has to be entered (ie., entered into the supplier's ERP system). Our company was doing the order entry for these faxed orders. Once we received an order from a hospital in a small European country. The order was for "baby blankets" or something similar that is used in a Neonatal ICU. Long story short, due to a two character error in translating the unit of measure from "EA" (i.e., Each = single unit) the hospital's unloading dock received two truck full of cases of baby blankets, enough to exceed the total annual birth-rate of that small European country. True story.