Streamlining Operations and Fueling Growth

How Drops saves 10+ hours a day by utilizing Distru & LeafLink to drive expansion and achieve economies of scale

"If we hadn’t implemented Distru when we did, we don’t know if we’d have been able to scale to meet the demand that was out there in the marketplace”
– Fergus, Drops COO

Specialty

Solventless Gummies & Extract

Distru Customer:

2+ Years and Counting

License Types:

Cultivation, Processing, Distribution

Operating In:

California & Oregon

Interview With:

Fergus, COO

Order Fulfillment

6x Faster

Drops can now create and fulfill sales orders in Minutes, not hours

Revenue Lost

$0.00

By eliminating production errors and inventory outages

Hours Saved

150+

Per Month, helping the Drops team work smarter, not harder

Major Challenges

Production Forecasting

Drops frequently encountered production bottlenecks as incoming sales orders would result in certain production ingredients depleting faster than anticipated.

Miscommunication and Sales Order Mistakes

It's hard to turn text messages into sales orders. Miscommunications about sales orders were causing friction between the sales team and their retail partners.

Double Data Entry

Managing their operations across multiple spreadsheets and different software allowed for human errors to be made, as well as wasting time that could've been spent on sales or production.

Key Distru Solutions

Dynamic BOMs

Building dynamic Bill of Materials for Drops' different product SKUs and mapping their production plan on Distru's calendar allows the Drops team to fully forecast their current and future production runs. Running out of inventory while processing is a problem of the past!

Distru x LeafLink Integration

LeafLink is a critical component of Drops' business! Seamlessly communicating data between Distru and LeafLink allows the team to fulfill sales orders faster, while also eliminating the lost revenue and slowdowns that come with sales order miscommunication.

Distru x Metrc Integration

Distru's Live 2-way Metrc integration allows the team to internally audit for Metrc discrepancies while saving hours of their time per day on Metrc related tasks.

See why Drops Candies and 300+ other brands trust Distru to power their operations

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The Challenge: Production Forecasting & Efficient Sales Flows

Prior to Distru, Drop’s inventory tracking was very basic. This posed an issue as they had to track both cannabis & non-cannabis ingredients that are used to produce their Drops candies. They were tracking various sugars, pectin, strain-specific THC, batches of CBD, which are all used in their various product SKUs. Drops’ primary sellers are their jelly candies. These candies come in 10 different SKUs, with 5 of them being THC flavors and 5 being various ratios of THC : CBD.

Production bottlenecks would occur as they’d deplete one ingredient faster than they anticipated due to incoming work orders. Their CBD oil is not strain specific, and is used in a majority of their SKUs. “So, we may build all work orders for eight batches that we need to cook that week, but by the sixth work order we build that we don’t in fact have enough CBD oil to get us through. [We’re] not able to actually cook those [last] two production batches that week because we’ve run out of CBD oil.” - Karlie, General Manager

LeafLink is a crucial component of their business. The majority of their sales come from LeafLink orders.

It’s hard to turn text messages into sales orders, as they can be easily misinterpreted. Retailers will use descriptors like “give me the orange candy” and think they’re ordering one SKU, but are displeased when they receive another. These communication issues were causing friction between Drops and their retail partners.

Prior to Distru, if an influx of LeafLink orders would come in, a sales rep would have to manually create the sales order internally, often duplicating prior orders & resulting in errors. There was no way to double check your work and make sure everything was being prepared correctly.

They used to have sales reps wait 6-7 hours for everything to be prepared before they could go out to fulfill an order. Sometimes, they wouldn’t even be able to get out that day at all.

How Distru Has Helped with Production Forecasting

With Distru’s Bill of Materials:

“It’s really allowed us to project our inventory needs and realize what we need for our production lines.” - Karlie, General Manager

We’ve eliminated the issue they had of running out of CBD for their production batches. They create all their production batches in Distru now, and are able to forecast how much inventory will be needed for a weeks worth of production batches.

“Distru’s Metrc integration is what revolutionized our order fulfillment team”

They don’t have to look between Metrc, LeafLink, and Distru constantly in order to get work done. They can just use Distru as a point of reference. This decreases the number of human errors made as well as the time it takes to complete tasks.

Getting the customer’s order right is their top priority. This keeps the customer happy & ensures a stronger relationship between Drops and their retailers. The Drops team is very pleased with the safeguards set in place with Distru so that mistakes will not occur. Distru doesn’t even allow you to make the mistake — you can only choose from Metrc packages that already exist, only use existing quantities of inventory, and only fulfill what’s listed on the sales order.

Creating the order used to take 30-45min, maybe an hour if something was going wrong or Metrc was being slow. Now an order can get pulled and prepared in 3-5min.

As order volume increased, this decrease in time to create & prepare orders was crucial for Drops to scale as a business. Sales reps are now able to create a sales order and fulfill immediately.

How the Distru x LeafLink Integration has Improved Sales Flows

LeafLink allows for retailers to purchase the exact SKUs in the exact quantities they want, eliminating the possibility of order miscommunications.

Fergus, the COO of Drops, sees the Distru x LeafLink integration as a crucial component of their business.

“If you think about Pre-Distru days, we really had gone through a situation where we were hiring people just be able to manage this growth we were experiencing in 2020. If we hadn’t implemented Distru when we did, we don’t know if we’d have been able to scale to meet the demand that was out there in the marketplace.”
“The very fact that we have a relationship, we’re able to get the value out of Distru, and we’ve been able to reduce our timelines, actually allowed us to have a massive level of scalability we would not have had without Distru being implemented.”

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