Systems and methods for managing canisters used to automatically dispense medication are provided. Canisters are configurable via a design process and a build process to accurately dispense a variety of medications. Design profiles are created and stored by a canister management system, and are federated to workstations used to build and fill the canisters, and to workstations used to dispense the medication. Information related to the build process, the fill process, and the dispense process is also federated by the system. The system also enables the transmission of other types of messages between client applications on the workstations and the canister management system. The system is useful to federate data regardless of a structure of a supply chain used to design, build, distribute, and use the canisters.