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.
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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.
