As the largest vertically integrated operator in the U.S. cannabis industry, Trulieve needs to be able to track everything “from seed to sale,” said Nicole Zimmerman, senior director of SAP Product Management at Trulieve. “From the time the plants get planted in the ground all the way until they end up in a retail store.”
“We are an agricultural company,” she continued, “but we also have to be able to process the product, so we are simultaneously a manufacturing company and a distribution company because we have to control how things are being moved to all of our stores. And then we are a retail company because we sell it in our stores. We track the entire supply chain.”
Trulieve has been an SAP customer since 2020. It initially chose SAP because its legacy system couldn’t keep up with the company’s growth and demand. “We needed to leverage SAP S/4HANA and the scale it gave us just to be able to keep up with sales,” Zimmerman explained. Today, Trulieve’s SAP portfolio also includes SAP SuccessFactors solutions and SAP Concur solutions.
Trulieve started in 2016, so the company is only nine years old, which gave it the ability to be cloud-native from the start. “We didn’t have any of the legacy technical debt that a lot of other companies may have. That enabled us to have all cloud-based solutions and when new technology becomes available, we’re able to quickly adopt it. That definitely puts us in a position to be able to leverage technology of the future, as opposed to being tied to legacy technology,” Zimmerman said.
That’s important because keeping up with the growth in the marijuana market is top of the agenda for Trulieve, which already operates in multiple states and is a market leader in Arizona, Florida, and Pennsylvania.
“Obviously we want to continue that growth,” Zimmerman said. The biggest catalyst for growth is when states legalize recreational marijuana use, which opens up the entire market for Trulieve’s hand-grown marijuana products. “The big focus for us is scalability and stability in our solutions to make sure we are able to support that growth,” she said.
“SAP enables us to have more insight into our growth and manage production better than any other system that’s out there,” Zimmerman said. And since Trulieve is a publicly traded company, running SAP S/4HANA also helps ensure that Trulieve’s management has access to all the internal controls and other features they need for regulatory and other purposes.
Zimmerman emphasized that Trulieve also relies heavily on data—the company’s customer data platform combines data from multiple applications, enabling it to market more effectively to its customers and make operational decisions. “That definitely empowers our teams to be able to provide real-time information to our leaders, who can then make decisions literally on the fly in terms of pricing our products, or whether we need to make a promotion in order to achieve sales targets.”
She also believes that the AI tools SAP is embedding in its solutions will deliver real benefits: “I think we have a number of opportunities in terms of being able to leverage AI with our retail dispensary associates operating on the actual sales floor.” For example, she said it might be used by associates in the stores or on the phone to suggest products to customers based on data previously captured through Trulieve’s supply chain, coupled with other information and metrics.
But she said the biggest thing Trulieve has learned is that to be able to scale your business you have to have solutions that are going to be able to adapt to that scale. In addition, in a dynamic market, companies need solutions that adapt and are highly flexible.
“This environment is incredibly dynamic, so that means that tomorrow we could get legislation that opens up cannabis to the entire country,” she said. “When that happens how would it change our organization? We have to be super adaptable to any of those types of changes that are going on in the in the larger political realm.”
SAP technology, she said, provides the scalability and flexibility, together with the data, the company’s leaders need to make the best decision in real time.
Top image via customer video
