Back to school for everybody. I hope that's going well for those of you that have kids. If not, it's great to talk about the business at this time. We continue to be very optimistic about our business despite what we all can acknowledge is a pretty difficult environment. We've made significant investments over many years to strengthen our company, and we're starting to see those investments bear fruit, although we certainly have more work to do to ensure that we deliver the growth that we expect of ourselves as a company. If we look at last fiscal year, our fiscal year 2025, which ended in June, that year was mixed for us. We delivered less than we had expected to from a top-line perspective, but we over-delivered on both margin and earnings behind our strong margin transformation program.
Q4 looked much the same, where we delivered strong margin and earnings performance, but under-delivered on top-line. If you look at the shape of the year, really the first half of the year, our consumer assumptions were about what we expected them to be. Category assumptions were what they expected to be, and our share assumptions were the same. In the back half of the year, though, around February, when we saw the consumer take a turn, given all the uncertainty that's out there, we definitely had an impact in our business. We can talk more about what we expect for fiscal year 2026 and all the things that we're doing to invest to ensure that we have strong categories and we can continue to win with the consumer. Also importantly, in Q4, we began the implementation of our U.S.
version of our ERP system, which is not just an upgrade, but we did a greenfield implementation of a new ERP. Of course, our U.S. business is big, so it's 85% of our company's business. That generally went very well. The pre-build in Q4 went well. We had a number of modules that happened in Q1, beginning in July. We had some bumpiness in August, which we can talk about. As we were on the order fulfillment part, as you're bringing retailers up, we saw bumpiness in getting inventories where they needed to be. You're actually seeing that in scanner data in August. The good news is we're past that. We are now shipping well above consumption. We're rebuilding inventories. What that means, Lauren, and for everybody, is that we expect to be at the low end of our range for Q1.
That's based on what we know right now, but expecting to see, as we have for the last couple of weeks, those shipments rebound and we'll see consumption rebound here in September. We've already seen that in the last weeks of data. With that, maybe I'll hand it over to you for kicking off in questions.
OK. Perfect. Just to follow up on that in particular, because I know it's only Q1, and you said you're through it. Low end for Q1, but you expect to catch up. The range is still the range for the year, but you expect to catch up. We should think.
We have lots of room left in a year. At this point, we're just letting you know we think it's the low end of the range for Q1. Obviously, that's well within what we contemplated. We'll see how the rest of the year plays out. At this point, we're just in the low end of the range for Q1, and we'll continue to keep people updated if there are changes to the full year.
OK. Perfect. Let's go back to a high level, then.
Yeah.
Great. There's been lots of volatility since COVID, obviously. First, I'd love to talk about what you see as long-term category growth, where Clorox competes, what more recent trends have been at a category level, and what you think causes that sort of below long-range performance dynamic.
Yeah. Typically, our categories, on average, grow about 2% - 2.5% in the U.S. I'm excluding our professional business, and obviously excluding our international business, where we have markets that grow at differing rates from that. In the U.S., excluding professional, about 2% - 2.5%. We have seen, around that average, high ups and downs. Certainly, during COVID, we saw significantly higher category growth. In times where the consumer is stressed, we've seen lower. It does tend to have a floor. We tend to see flattish as about the floor in our categories. They typically are pretty steady. What we've seen over the last six months is not wildly out of line with that, Lauren, but definitely more volatile. We're seeing it in categories we typically don't see volatility in. For example, food is a good example for us, which has been very steady.
We're just in the salad, dressing, and condiments, and dips part of the business. That's typically fairly steady. That's been more bumpy. We're still expecting our categories to be flattish to slightly growing this year. That's about what we see. It's not out of line with what we've seen in past times with the consumer. I think the volatility is what's different and difficult to predict right now. When we look at maybe starting in February, we saw some category numbers that we hadn't seen before, down, low to mid-single digits for short periods of time, and then bouncing back. The good news is we've seen it stabilize in Q4, and that's continued in Q1, albeit at those lower growth rates of about flattish. Again, it depends on the week. Certainly, our inventory position in those few weeks in August impacted the categories.
We're starting to see them bounce back a little bit as our inventories come back. As we look ahead, I think it's safe to say the consumer's definitely under stress. Although they continue to have decently healthy incomes, et cetera, they're starting to see some, they're afraid of inflation. They're starting to see a bit. I think the thing that's most difficult is there's just so much uncertainty for them in a myriad of facets in their life. We think they're going to continue to be cautious. In our categories, what cautious looks like is they tend to trade within our own portfolio to larger sizes. They look for more value SKUs. That can compress category growth, right? Instead of buying, let's say you're buying normally 90 ounces of something, you're buying 60 ounces, and you're trying to make it stretch.
That inherently slows category growth down while you're in that mode. What we're focused on is strong category investments and then also winning share at the same time, but really focused primarily, job number one is getting those categories back to that 2% - 2.5%, which we don't have any reason to believe that won't happen in the future once we get through this rough time from a consumer perspective.
OK. Let's talk also, though, about Clorox versus the categories a bit. Outside of the August dynamic, because consumption in 4Q was down around 3%. In Nielsen, it's been that way. You just shared why August, but we saw it in July as well. The underperformance is kind of broad based. Why is it, do you think, that Clorox is currently losing share in so many spots? It's pretty broad based.
We are in a few categories. There are some categories that are doing really, really well right now. Maybe I'll start with where we're doing well, but I do want to get to your point, which is an important one. Certainly, our business in international and professional, which I know people have less visibility to, continues to do well, and we continue to grow share in both of those segments. In addition, our cleaning business continues to perform very well, and we continue to grow share. That's a highly competitive category for us. Innovation is working really well. Our brand investments are working really well. There are a number of places in the company where it's going very well, and share is not a concern for us. We'll see the normal ups and downs as we see competitive activity, but we feel great about our plans.
Particularly in Q4, there were a couple of places we just didn't execute well. Kingsford's one we spoke about on the call. What does that really mean? What does not executing well, not well mean? It means in an environment where the consumer is changing rapidly, we must change as rapidly our plans to adjust. That's where we just fell a little short in Kingsford. For example, we saw a lot of consumers who couldn't afford to buy larger sizes, which is typically what we merchandise in a time of when they're grilling for Memorial Day or for the 4th of July. What we adjusted our plan for later in the year was to account for that. We had smaller size merchandising, making sure that we had that right level. Also, our merchandising levels were just down a little bit based off of what retailers were doing.
That's what we mean by execution. That's what sharpened in July 4th. If you looked at the category, and we bounced back, and the category bounced back, we bounced back in July 4th. We're hoping the same for Labor Day, which just happened. That data will come out in a couple of weeks. Those are the kind of examples of, as the consumer's moving, we need to move a bit faster. That accounts for most of what we saw from an execution perspective. In addition, there were just some of our categories that had shifts that we didn't anticipate. Food is a good example, where we've grown share consistently for years. That's a place where it's been pretty heavily impacted by consumers. Again, in the long run, we don't see any change materially in what we think their behaviors are going to be. In the short term, they're making trade-offs.
We just didn't move as quickly as we needed to to adjust. We feel good about our plans, innovation, and spending. I would say Q4 was a few categories where we didn't execute well. We know why. It really is about speed and making sure we adjust our plans as we see the consumer move really fast.
OK. You've had so many, both the volatility, operational challenges that come with that volatility, the work that you've been doing on greenfield on SAP, the reorg type work. Do you think the organization is distracted?
I wouldn't say distracted, but I think this is a really important point. Maybe we can spend a bit of time on it, just our transformation, what we're trying to accomplish, and then, yes, what the organization's trying to take on and the trade-offs we're making. Making zero excuses, because I don't believe in excuses, but I certainly think the context is important. We had COVID, which we were disproportionately impacted by. Our categories were significantly impacted, and it took quite a bit of time to catch up. We lost share during that period as all these little brands came in and just filled the holes when there weren't enough disinfecting products to go around.
Once we recovered from COVID, we really said we needed to wholeheartedly transform the company because we needed modern capabilities, we needed a modern digital foundation, and all of the tools and capabilities you would expect from a company of our size. We announced our investment in our transformation. We had a period of incredible inflation where, again, we were disproportionately impacted given our portfolio and U.S. footprint. We were able to recover all of that margin over the last three years through the capabilities we built. Unfortunately, we were hit by a fairly substantial cyber attack in 2023. Not making any excuses, but we're trying to deal with all of those shocks, as well as what's going on with the consumer. We're trying to transform so that we can better deal with those shocks.
Our transformation is about investing hundreds of millions of dollars, well over $550 million, in rebuilding the digital foundation of the company. We did all the things that you would want us to do. We rebuilt our data lake and foundation so that all of the data that we have, we can actually use in the way that we want to do that. We can get the insights so that we can move as fast as the consumer is moving, so that we can remove costs, like we have been known for for many, many years, that we can invest back in our business or return to shareholders. We began that journey about three or four years ago. We were doing all those things in tandem with that transformation. In addition, we intend to accelerate growth, and we had periods over that time where we did.
If you look at 2023, right before the cyber attack, we had rebuilt our share positions in many cases, and we had started to see that translate into growth. Of course, we had to recover from the cyber attack. What I would say is all of those instances show the strength of our brands, that we were able to get through that. I think certainly the cyber attack showed how incredibly strong our brands are. We were able to get all of our distribution back. In fact, grew distribution after that, regained the vast majority of our share. We still have work to do, particularly in a few categories we've spoken about, and we're making the right investments to ensure the company is stronger. All sites continue to be focused on in that transformation, finishing the job on digital. It's not done yet.
We are in the stabilization phase right now. We feel good about where we are. We have additional modules that will come from a manufacturing side in the next couple of quarters, but those went very well in Q1. We would anticipate them to go very well for the remainder of the year. We had to extract the value out of all of those investments we made in the transformation, and that will continue to fuel us. I wouldn't say the organization has been distracted, because this is the most important work that we do, building strong capabilities for the company. We've had a lot going on.
That being said, in a time where the consumer is stressed, in a time where we need to ensure the categories are healthy, and of course, you have heard us talk much more about share in the last 18 to 24 months than we have in many years past, we are absolutely laser-focused on getting our categories growing again, and winning in those categories. I feel confident in the innovation plan we have this year, particularly in the back half. We'll be launching some new platforms, and obviously, continuing in fiscal year 2027, we have a very strong pipeline in getting that growth renewed. Our brands are stronger than they've ever been, arguably. We have a consumer value metric that says we continue to have stronger brands than we did pre-COVID. Now we need to do all of that work to ensure that we're extracting the value from those brands.
I'm sure we can talk more about superior value and all those things that that means. I want to just pause. Again, I don't think this is a distraction. It's the most important work we do. There's been a lot going on. We intend, just like we did on margin, for those growth plans to begin to take hold. We will begin to see that in the back half of this year.
OK. I do want to talk about innovation. First, one more question on the transformation, which was around reimagined work. I think that work started like six years ago now-ish with the Ignite strategy. I know it takes time for people to adapt to new ways of working. I was wondering if you could help just briefly describe kind of how things function now versus then, right? Is reimagined work kind of fully action so that you've got the org structure the way you want it versus what the vision was six years ago?
Six years ago was a lifetime.
A lifetime.
Exactly. What was contemplated by that team at the time, which I was part of, was not what we are doing right now. Reimagined work back then, we wanted to be digitally enabled. We wanted to move at the speed of the consumer. When COVID hit, I took over as CEO, and our management team looked at each other and said, reimagined work means a very different thing. There's not one person in The Clorox Company that can work like they are today in the future. We won't be fast enough. We won't respond quick enough to customer and consumer requirements. We do not have the digital foundation to be able to do that. Frankly, as we started to see technologies emerge around AI, we wouldn't be ready for those things.
Reimagined work went from, we need to move as fast as the consumer, and over time, we'll do this too. We fundamentally need to reinvent the capabilities of the company. We have gone systematically to do that with a digital foundation as the core, because that's what gives you all of the insight to be able to do it. What you've started to see is that come to life in, I will give you the margin work that we've done. We lost about 900 basis points of gross margin from the effects of inflation. We were able to get that all back in a shorter period of time than we thought because we had begun to put those digital pieces in place, and we rebuilt capabilities. We didn't have a holistic net revenue management program, et cetera.
We're starting to get the fruit of those labors really this year as we began to build it. We have been going capability by capability to reimagined work. We're building the next level of capabilities in marketing. We talked about personalization was our big journey. We met our goal last year. Now we're looking at one-to-one as our next goal. How are we going to continue to drive the type of ROIs that we've experienced? We're in the top quintile of ROI from an industry perspective on marketing. We want to continue that investment. In places where, Lauren, frankly, we were just really behind, we needed to rebuild those capabilities to ensure they could deliver the value. It follows really the path of what we announced back four years ago than it does when we were in 2019. I'll give you an example. I think this is really tangible.
In June, thousands of people in the company worked one way, how they took orders, processed them, how they worked in a manufacturing plant, how the business units planned, how they decided how much volume they had, what merchandising was. We flipped a switch. In July, everybody works differently now, completely differently. That's bumpy, right? You have a person who's used to doing something manually in systems, and now they have to let it happen in a system that's guided, et cetera. That's what reimagined work means right now, is making sure everyone has those tools, that they're working as fast as the consumer is. I would say we've made great progress, more to do. This is really now when we get to the value creation part of the space. We made the investment phase and the execution phase. Now we're in the let's extract the value from these investments.
OK. Great. Let's switch to innovation. Embedded in the guidance is the second half step up, right? You just mentioned the stronger pipeline. I guess to the degree you can talk about it, because I know it's early from that standpoint, but kind of what differentiates the upcoming launches versus what you've had from the innovation slate in the past?
We had talked a lot about back in 2019, Lauren, when we announced our Ignite strategy, that the things that we saw in common that worked for innovation were having platform launches versus one-off launches that may or may not work. What we wanted to do was really find a big consumer idea that we can invest behind for many, many years. We called that platform innovation and ensure that our investment made good sense and that the consumer had a really good understanding of where the brand was taking them over a number of years. We did good work around that over the last few years, and last year's innovations built off of many platforms that already existed in the company. For example, we launched a new great flavor of our Glad trash bags in Bahama Bliss. Did very well. It wasn't a new-to-life innovation.
It was building off of a current platform we had. What's different this year is we will be launching new platforms. Of course, you can't do that on every brand every year. We will have different brands every year. We'll have a type of that refresh. You'll see from us some new consumer spaces that we're getting into with the current brands that we have that we're excited about. Because those are so new, we won't talk about them now, but excited to talk to you about them when they ship in the back half of the year. That's really what the team is looking at. Can we get more innovation that is truly incremental? We want to do the great work that we've done on new flavor expansions and claims, et cetera.
We want to combine that with also getting into new spaces where our brands have a right to win. That's what differentiates this year. I would also talk about the fact that from a platform perspective, these innovations, because we've built this model, are well funded. We intend for these to be multi-year platforms that you would see additional launches in fiscal year 2027, fiscal year 2028 that we'll continue to invest behind.
Has anything changed in your approach to consumer insights, sourcing ideas for innovation, consumer testing, and also maybe you can talk a little bit about speed?
Yes. A lot has changed in that. With the investment that we've made in that data foundation that I spoke about, as well as our technology, we've fundamentally changed the way that we are doing innovation. We've built what we call a digital core, and that allows us to shrink the time that it would typically take for us to have a concept to launch dramatically. We're talking less than half the time that we used to, and we're doing that in the ideation form. We're using AI and GenAI to scan trends in the marketplace. We're able to pinpoint and identify where those trends are on their curve. Are they very early and probably not to a place where we could drive value out of them? Are they at just the right place where, if we were to launch something, there's a lot of value to be had?
Is maybe the trend past and it's something that we just need to walk away from? We were too late. After we have those insights, we can create product concepts in a matter of just days, and we can test it with thousands of consumers, millions if we wanted to, to gain insight. They help us name the product, say what claims make sense to them, or this is a great or a bad idea. That insight window that we have, the speed, the amount of information that we can get from consumers is dramatically increased. Gone are the days where you bring 10 people around a table, and that's the way that you gain insight because you hand them a prototype, and they say they like it or they don't. You hope you get the right 10 consumers.
We have massive amounts of data on our hand that help us move with that type of speed and give us better insight. We talked about an innovation, the first one we had launched about a year and a half ago, which was our Clorox Toilet Bomb. That's a great example of an innovation we would have never named, Clorox Toilet Bomb, without consumers telling us that's what it should be called. These are the types of things that our marketers now have at their fingertips, our innovators have at their fingertips, more real-time consumer insight that can help them move with speed. Now what we're figuring out, Lauren, is how do we continue to scale that? How do we ensure that we are putting the right attention on the right businesses at the right time?
How do we make sure we think about what are the right kind of platform ways that we would do this going forward? For example, how do you test if a platform has reached the end of its growth curve versus just an item? Those are the things that we're working on with GenAI now.
OK. In this vein, on the fourth quarter call, you mentioned brand superiority a number of times. I'm just curious, what does superiority mean at Clorox in practice? How is it being measured? I guess maybe flag areas of strength versus those that are more lacking.
Superiority is the foundation for strong categories and for share growth and having strong brands. It is something that we believe very deeply in. We have a framework that we use internally to ensure that our brands are strong. You've heard us talk about our consumer value metric before. That is a proprietary in-market data assessment of where we're superior. When we say 60% of our portfolio has a superior consumer value metric, it's actually based off of velocity and data in the market. The way that we look at superiority is much broader than that, and it's around our 5P model . We need to ensure that we have the right product, we have the right package, we're in the right place, we have the right proposition. All of these things have to come together to create superiority. We've reinvigorated this behind this model with our team.
Each one of our business units is responsible for going through and scorecarding themselves where they are on the superiority framework. Is it that perhaps they don't have the right presence in e-commerce? How are they going to deal with that in order to be superior? Is the proposition, if competitors have made a move, does our proposition continue to hold up? Is it superior? Our teams are doing that assessment, and then their plans for innovation and cost savings, product improvements are all based off of that superiority plan. This work, we just re-kicked this work off in earnest over the last year to say, are we all clear where we want to be and where we want to go? We are tying that to our innovation plans.
That's what it means to us, that entire experience for the consumer is superior so that when they get to the shelf, digital or physical, they say, I love that, and I have to have it. That's how we win. That's how categories grow over time. That's how we grow our share in our categories. There are places, Lauren, where we have been superior for a long period of time. You've seen that. In many of our cleaning businesses, for example, you see clear superiority. You see, even if we have ups and downs as competitors launch innovation or they spend, we're able to continue to grow over time and grow share because we maintain that superiority. Litter's a good example where we have not had superiority. You can absolutely see the results of that. We're rebuilding that right now.
We've made progress, but we have more work to do, as we've talked about. Fundamentally, when we were coming back from the cyber attack, not only were there just category issues and dynamics going on with e-commerce, but we fundamentally weren't superior. That is what the team is focused on. First, we had to get our distribution back, get our plans stable. Now it is systematically improving that superiority across those 5Ps.
OK. Let's talk about promotional activity. During earnings season, we heard a couple of companies mention watchpoints. I think you, in particular, mentioned trash and litter specifically. Just curious how the competitive environment evolves from here. We've talked about the consumer being stretched, category growth being sluggish. It feels like a pretty open question in terms of how do companies respond, and does the promotional activity worsen?
Generally, we're seeing a fairly rational environment right now from competitors. That's on average. We're seeing promotional levels exactly what we would have expected them to be. There are pockets, though, where I would say not just promotion, but just generally competitive activity is higher. That is absolutely true in litter, and that is absolutely true in our trash business. We are seeing higher levels of competitive activity across a number of forms, promotion being some of that. I think everybody is looking to see what they can do to support the consumer, and everyone does that in a different way. What we would say is, as we approach this problem, whether it be continuing to win in categories we're winning in today or in places like trash and litter where we are making improvements, we are really focused on a few things.
One, we believe there's a way to grow over time that is consistent with our model, and we think the right way to grow household penetration. That's investing in innovation, it's investing in advertising and sales promotion, it's using insights to get to know the consumer better and delivering them a superior proposition that they're willing to pay for. We believe that's the right model over the long term that delivers value, and we religiously believe in that. We're also not afraid, though, in the short term to increase merchandising if we need to and be competitive. We do not want to destroy category profitability. We're very clear that the way to win is not just by giving people a lower price on a trash bag. Those are the things that we're balancing right now based on what we see for competitive activity.
We're really ensuring we have our price gaps right right now. We're sharpening that. There are places where I think we can sharpen that. Overall, we want to make sure that we're doing this in a way that is constructive, in a way that we feel we can add good value over time. You have seen us, for example, in litter. Part of the reason it was more promotional was because of us, because we were out of stock during the cyber attack. We needed to get back in, and we used promotion to do that because it's an effective tool. Promotion can be quite strategic. Also, it can just be tactical when you need to get your distribution and share back. Certainly, there are places where we've leaned into that as well.
As we look forward, the consumer is going to continue to be under stress, which means we believe the environment will continue to be competitive. We don't at this point foresee anything completely irrational happening. I think what people are trying to do, you're seeing innovation ramp up. You're seeing people talk a lot more about consumer insights. Certainly, in our categories where we tend to lead those, that's what we're focused on with retailers, is helping them think about market basket. How can they grow the categories in their store? How can they remind consumers it's a great time to grill? How can they remind consumers as their kids are going back to school, they need cleaning supplies, or maybe you need to teach them to clean, based on an earlier conversation Lauren and I had?
Those are the things that we think we're going to continue to see in the category. We'll see places where it continues to be more competitive.
Let's just talk for a moment about guidance. Low end of the range for this quarter. Can you just talk a bit about any kind of key category growth assumptions built into the forecast for the balance of the year?
Sure. As we think about the guidance, maybe let me talk briefly about the impact of the ERP and then talk about the impact excluding the ERP, because there are a lot of moving pieces. The ERP is clearly the most significant assumption in our outlook and guidance. It's a transitory one, but it creates a lot of noise. It creates a year-over-year decline of 7% - 8%. As Linda just mentioned, we went live in July. In preparation for that go live, we ended up shipping two weeks of volume in June of fiscal year 2025 instead of July of fiscal year 2026. Those two weeks were worth about 3.5 to 4 points of sales, which means that fiscal year 2025 absolute sales were higher by 3.5 to 4 points, and fiscal year 2026 absolute sales were lower by 3.5 to 4 points.
Looking at year-over-year, that creates a 7% - 8% decline. While we acknowledge it creates a lot of noise, it's important to remember that this is transitory. There's nothing structural about this. Importantly, as Linda just mentioned, it's a necessity for us to meet our future aspirations. We're essentially fundamentally modernizing the backbone of our company. That's going to help us drive a lot of productivity, not only in supply chain and admin, but also unlock some top-line accelerations, as we now have access to data and insight that we never had before. That's for the ERP. It creates a lot of noise. Of course, this noise should start going down as we move through the quarters. Excluding the ERP, our outlook guidance essentially implies organic sales growth to be - 1% to + 2%. We're assuming the external environment continues to be volatile, uncertain, and challenging.
We expect the consumer to continue their value-seeking behaviors. We also expect competitive activity to remain heightened and the tariff environment to remain uncertain. Specifically to category growth, I think Linda just mentioned it. We expect it to be lower than historical average, with category continuing to be sluggish. That means for us, U.S. retail growth averaging 0% - 1% through the year. There will be variations by businesses and month to month. As we look at the sequencing throughout the years, we would expect the front half to decline low single digits, and then the back half to have organic sales growth to grow low single digits. Q1, we just talked about it briefly. We're assuming the consumption trends that we saw in the prior quarters, including the share pressure, to continue.
Our outlook is for sales to decline 17% - 21%, but it includes 2 points of decline from the VMS divestiture and 14% - 15% from the ERP reversal. Excluding this, we essentially assume that Q1 organic sales growth, excluding the ERP, would decline low single digits. As Linda just mentioned, given the slower than expected ramp-up in our order fulfillment capability with the new ERP and the out-of-stock that we saw in August, we expect it would be on the lower end of that range. Beyond Q1, we expect sequential improvements in both consumption and market share, with most of it coming in the back half. I think Linda alluded to it. We feel like we have strong plans in place to either reinforce or actually improve in some businesses' superiority.
Some of that includes strong initiatives in revenue management, but also strong innovation plans, with launching new platforms in the back half, expanding on the existing platform. In general, we're excited about the innovation in the back half. We feel like we have strong plans and the right level of spending behind it.
OK. Great. The company's been through so much. If we look longer term, sort of fiscal 2028 theoretically, right, no more ERP comparison to contend with. I'm curious to talk a little bit about the structure of the P&L, because gross margin's already back to pre-COVID level. Thinking about to what extent does long-term EBIT margin expansion depend more on SG&A leverage versus further expansion in gross margin?
Sure. I would say our long-term goal is to continue expanding EBIT margin by 25 to 50 basis points. In general, we feel good about our ability to continue doing this over the next few years while reinvesting in the business. A few things to consider. First, we continue to feel good about our ability to drive cost savings. Historically, we always had very robust cost savings programs. In recent years, we moved this program to a more holistic margin management, including adding new capabilities like net revenue management, design to value, and leveraging a lot more data and technology. That's really working for us. We saw a record level of cost savings in the past few years, and we actually feel really good about the pipeline going forward. That's the first thing.
Second, the new ERP implementations, we're going to start seeing the noise, the cost, and the volatility associated with that project coming down and the benefits ramp up, most likely starting next year. With that, we expect a lot of productivity on the supply chain, which should help continue expanding gross margin. We're also expecting benefits on working capital. In addition, with the increased level of automation, we should see some good benefit on SG&A as well. Maybe one third thing to consider that we generally don't talk much about, but it's like we're starting really accelerating our global business services capability. Historically, because of our antiquated, I would say, data and technology infrastructure, we were not able to take as much advantage of that capability. Now that we moved to the new ERP, we're able to really accelerate it.
That creates a lot of productivity in admin through automation and through offshoring. When you take all those three things together, we feel like we have really a strong pipeline and roadmap for years to come to continue expanding gross margin and lowering SG&A. That gives us confidence in our ability to expand EBIT margin while reinvesting in the business.
OK. We have to wrap up. That was a good place to end, talking about the future. Thank you so much for being here. Please join me in thanking Clorox for joining us today.
Thank you, Lauren.
Thank you.