As the largest grower, manufacturer and retailer of medical cannabis products in the U.S., Trulieve must be able to oversee all processes “from seed to sale,” said Nicole Zimmerman, senior director of SAP Product Management at Trulieve. “This applies from the planting of the seedlings to the finished products that go over the counter.”
“We are an agricultural company,” she continues. “But we also have to be able to process the product. This means we are also a manufacturing company. And we are a distribution company because we have to control how our products get to our points of sale. And finally, we are also a retail company because we sell the products in our shops. We monitor the entire supply chain.”
Trulieve has been an SAP customer since 2020. The company originally chose SAP because its legacy system couldn’t keep up with the company’s growth and market demand. “The introduction of SAP S/4HANA and the use of the associated scaling options were a necessary step just to be able to handle sales,” explains Nicole Zimmerman. Today, Trulieve’s SAP portfolio also includes SAP SuccessFactors and SAP Concur solutions.
The company was founded in 2016. It is only nine years old and was therefore able to rely entirely on cloud solutions from the start. “Unlike many other companies, we had no technical legacy. This enabled us to work with completely cloud-based solutions. When new technologies become available, we can introduce them quickly. This means we are ideally positioned to use future technology and are not tied to outdated technologies,” concludes Nicole Zimmerman.
This plays an important role for Trulieve: The company, which already has sales outlets in several US states and is the market leader in Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania, wants to take advantage of the growth of the cannabis market.
“Of course we want to continue our growth path,” explains Nicole Zimmerman. The biggest driver of growth is the legalization of recreational cannabis in additional US states, opening the entire market to Trulieve’s hand-grown cannabis products. “For us, the scalability and stability of our solutions are key. We want to ensure that we can support this growth,” she explains.
“With SAP’s solutions we have better insight into our growth and can control production better than with any other system,” says Nicole Zimmerman with conviction. And as a publicly traded company, Trulieve can also use SAP S/4HANA to ensure management has access to all internal controls and other functions required for regulatory and other purposes.
Nicole Zimmerman points out that Trulieve relies heavily on data to run its processes: its customer data platform brings together data from multiple applications to enable more effective product marketing and better operational decisions. “This puts our teams in a much better position to provide our managers with real-time information. Based on this information, those responsible can then dynamically decide how to price our products or whether we need to run a promotion to achieve our sales goals.”
She also firmly believes that the AI tools that SAP is integrating into its solutions will bring real benefits: “I see several ways in which we can also use AI to support our retail and pharmacy distribution partners who sell our products.” As an example, she cites that sales staff in stores and pharmacies or on the order hotline could recommend products to customers based on data collected from Trulieve’s supply chain and combined with other information and metrics.
But Trulieve’s key takeaway, she believes, is that business growth requires solutions that support growth. In addition, in a dynamic market environment, companies need solutions that can be adapted and are highly flexible.
“The tremendous dynamics of this environment mean that laws could be passed tomorrow that legalize the use of cannabis nationwide,” explains Nicole Zimmerman. “How would our business change as a result of such legalization? We must be able to adapt as best as possible to any kind of changes that occur at the political level.”
They believe SAP technologies provide the scalability and flexibility needed, giving management access to the data they need to make optimal decisions in real time.
Image above from customer video
