MARY’S MEDICINALS USES FISHBOWL MANUFACTURING TO FINE-TUNE THEIR BUSINESS PROCESSES AND IMPROVE PRODUCTION AND SALES
Mary’s Medicinals prides itself on working at the “intersection of technology and horticulture,” and has become one of the leading manufacturers and wholesalers of cannabis-based nutraceutical products. With more than 80 employees, they manufacture and sell in 11 states where cannabis products are legal. The product line includes topicals, pain relief gels and balms, transdermal patches, tinctures, oils, and vape cartridges.
“We only sell to licensed facilities within the states that we are manufacturing,” says Lindsay Warren, Project Manager at Mary’s Medicinals. “We also have a sister company called Mary’s Nutritionals who sells similar products but made only with hemp, which is available nationwide and in some other countries.”
The company doesn’t grow cannabis plants or extract from plants. “We buy extracts from our partners and infuse our recipes to make the actual products sold through licensed cannabis retailers,” Warren notes.
Business Challenges & Needs
Mary’s had to manually count inventory each week, and it was causing a lot of problems when it came to accurately forecasting material and production needs. “We needed a tool that could forecast that manual labor for us,” according to Warren.
The Solution
“We started using Fishbowl Manufacturing, but at first we were having a hard time getting it to do what we really needed it to do,” Warren says. “We worked with Fishbowl to develop a customized plugin that would accurately track our oil inventory based off of active grams instead of just total mass. That was very important to us since we needed to track the potency of the oil that we’re using.”
The plugin provided a button that allowed for the measurement of the potency of the oil, a key aspect of each of their products since they are determined by potency of oil used – not just volume of oil.
Mary’s connected their Fishbowl data to their CRM to take orders. They also integrated it with their QuickBooks files and set it up on their hosted environment. Once implemented, they worked with Fishbowl on a trial run, making small adjustments along the way—a trial that took about two weeks. When they were comfortable with it, they first launched it in Colorado, then later in California. They are currently in the process of launching it in two other states.
Today, Fishbowl helps them keep track of their finished goods inventory, as well as forecast sales and consumption.
“Each day our fulfillment team comes in and prints off all the sales orders,” Warren explains. “We do the picking and packing process within Fishbowl. Our manufacturing team goes in and creates a manufacture order, which is essentially their recipe for what they’re going to be making that day. They print their pick report so they know which ingredients to mix, and once they finish, they can go in and enter the finished good quantities and finish the work order.”
Warren says for accounting they go in and sync with QuickBooks a couple of times per day so their sales orders that are fulfilled in Fishbowl then get pushed to the account team.
The Results
Fishbowl provides Mary’s with a single source of reporting for raw material consumption, merchants, cost of goods, and sales data. “That’s been the functionality that we’ve valued most,” Warren declares.
“Fishbowl has helped us speed up a lot of our production processes and eliminated a lot of the dedicated labor that would have been needed for manual inventory counts every week. It has definitely given us more time to fine-tune our production processes and focus on growing our company. It allows us to accurately look at our data and where we’re making or losing money that helps us make more informed business decisions for the success of the business.”
