So, how do you maintain a healthy and efficient supply chain?

You start by thinking like a client. Put yourself in their shoes – when they walk into your place of business, what do they want? Reliability, consistency, and quality of your service or product. If a returning customer found that his or her favorite strain was suddenly unavailable, or that it had suddenly deteriorated in quality and lost several decibels of its former loudness, then there’s a good chance you won’t be seeing that customer again. As such, these concepts should constantly be in the back of your mind when evaluating each link in you supply chain management.

The supply chain starts with the growers. Growers want what all farmers want: certainty of price and distribution. But there is a lot of diversity when it comes to the size and sophistication of suppliers in this industry. Some growers have a single tent in an apartment or a room in a home. Others use a green house plot or an entire field. This diversity can create inconsistencies for all members of the supply chain.

The next step in the supply chain is processing of the marijuana, where the buds are harvested from the plants. This could take place at the grower’s shop, or it could be a separate link in the supply chain, depending on the grower’s resources and business model.

This processing would involve different pre-distribution procedures, depending on whether they were intended for wholesale or retail buyers, in other words, whether it is being sent to an end user, or to additional links on the supply chain.

At this point, the cannabis has been prepared for preliminary distribution. Depending on exact where on the supply chain you want to focus on, product design and marketing may play a role

So the question becomes how to develop strategies to ensure efficiency and stability of your supply chain organization. Each entry point to the supply chain must be flexible, and able to cater to different sizes and qualities. As each supplier is aligned with suppliers of like size and quality, a marketplace is formed. Marketplaces are then organized by size, quality and variety, which leads to more specialized and often more interdependent markets.

There is strength in numbers. The cannabusiness community can and absolutely should organize and learn from one another to develop strategies for each link in the cannabis supply chain. Are you a smaller, more specialized grower? You can work with similarly sized businesses on coordinating timing, strains and vendor tactics.