Wholesale Cannabis Inventory – A Look at the Challenges & Solutions
Wholesale cannabis inventory management is a common area where producers often rely on manual processes due to the dynamic nature of how inventory must be managed. Whether you’re a cultivator, extractor, or edibles manufacturer, there are certainly common challenges with wholesale inventory management. Apex Trading delivers innovated solutions to these woes, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The Challenges of Wholesale Cannabis Inventory
The initial challenge every wholesale operator faces is how to manage inventory within their seed to sale (metrc, etc.) or ERP while also displaying that inventory to buyers in an accurate and attractive manner. Often, producers utilize Excel or PowerPoint to share available inventory. However, the inventory must then be manually updated with every order.
The second challenge with B2B cannabis inventory is accounting for all the nuances within the wholesale sales and allocation process. This can include customer-specific pricing or inventory allocation that the previously created menu doesn’t account for. Further is the inability to correctly set up and manage first-in-first-out (FIFO) to ensure the oldest inventory is sold first.
Without addressing these challenges, the internal team managing inventory and fulfillment is constantly having to manually reconcile data to ensure accurate records. Not only this, but they are also having to clean up issues that could have been prevented with the right tools and centralized data.
Let’s break companies into cohorts to uncover the unique difficulties larger operations encounter.
Vertical Operators
For vertical operators, they must balance allocation of inventory both for their internal stores as well as the external stores they sell wholesale to. Often, vertical operators find open marketplaces less than adequate because they don’t provide the ability to allocate inventory throughout the wholesale chain. Instead, these operators often are forced to build their own systems, whether an “ERP” or glorified excel sheets, which are costly to build and maintain while isolating themselves from the broader market. This results in technology silos leading to inefficient operations and decentralized data.
Large Wholesale Producers
For large wholesale producers, they often struggle with managing all the SKUs and correlating product batch data feeding from their seed to sale software into a live product menu. For example, they might have 8 batches of the same SKU but don’t have a good way of creating FIFO rules or they might have batches that need to be set aside for a certain client or reason which can’t be done easily.
The Solution to Wholesale Cannabis Inventory Challenges
No matter the size of a wholesale operation, efficiency begins with accurate inventory tied to external systems, which is the core of the Apex Trading platform. Even better we provide all the tools necessary to properly set up and manage FIFO along with allocation and dynamic pricing for each buyer. Once in place, sales and marketing teams are then provided with the tools they need such as email marketing and unique storefronts to generate new sales while benefiting from real-time updates. Lastly, as orders are placed, the fulfillment team can easily and quickly get orders out the door while the accounting team can rest assured all data is accurate doing away with reconciliation.
If you would like to learn more about how Apex Trading can help your business eliminate challenges and manage its wholesale cannabis inventory, we encourage you to request a quick demo by clicking here.