Among the many challenges for a cannabusiness in 2019, perhaps none are more crucial to the cannabis operator than accountability and staying in compliance. Remaining accountable and compliant while building your cannabis operation can seem like a tall order, but fortunately, this could serve you well by using the tracking and reporting data you’re required to produce for municipal, state and federal regulators to support those strategies and more.
Growing companies in this industry are already turning to cannabis enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for lean operational processes and remaining compliant, but also to create visibility and accountability and across their entire operation.
It’s no surprise that ERP’s utility has ported naturally into the relatively new legal marijuana industry since these full-scale business process systems were originally designed and implemented within traditional manufacturing industries with huge success.
Enterprise resource planning works by bringing all data pipelines of your cannabusiness into a unified system. From the accounting department to the warehouse floor, by taking your cannabis accounting and business process efforts to the cloud, you’re able to give authorized users ready access to relevant strategic data around the clock. As a result, key decision-makers are able to generate reports on any given facet of your organization while also cross-referencing it with any other.
Cannabis companies need to maintain meticulous records of every component of their production process, which is an impossible challenge for most cannabusinesses to do on their own and without proper technologies. Cannabis ERP systems have proven effective at easing the burden and offers its users a level of operational data that you simply would not have access to without it. This is invaluable when it comes to tracing the movements of your marijuana products and materials from seed to sale.
The inventory tracking of ERP systems does the hard work for you by batching materials categorically into lots, which are then tracked individually and as groups. ERP systems automatically generate many of the highly regulated forms of reporting required for cannabis compliance, including reports detailing where inventory has been, where it’s headed and every cannabis professional who’s interacted with your regulated cannabis products along the way.
ERP software comes in handy for the production and quality control processes, too. Involved at every phase of the marijuana product lifecycle—from keeping vital operations data on strains and growth cycles to collecting data on product processing, taking raw marijuana plants and turning them into saleable cannabis products, ERP is there every step of the way.
Tracking cannabis products is as much about customer safety as it is about keeping at bay the regulatory municipal, state and federal government bodies; cannabis products are, after all, products designed for human consumption/ingestion, and thus must be monitored for tampering. Cannabis customers expect a high level of consistency and safety in the cannabis products they consume, and ERP systems foster the kind of accountability and process replication that are necessary to meet these standards.
Cannabis ERP systems allow cannabis growers to set and monitor their grow cycles, which helps ensure that no plants are wasted throughout a single season. Additionally, this kind of targeted tracking of individual plants and lots within their growth cycles continues to feed into the other primary concerns of cannabusinesses: regulatory compliance and product homogeneity. By staying on top of plants during their growth cycles, cannabis ERP systems help produce both regulatory and quality accountability.
Managing cannabis production, cultivation and retailing is an extremely challenging endeavor if you’re not prepared for all the requirements. Your cannabusiness will be responsible for monitoring everything occurring in your plant’s growth cycle including where it is located in the production process in order to deliver a fresh, safe, and usable product to the cannabis customer.
Taking a cannabis plant from seed to flower requires a number of exact processes that must be performed at the right moment in the plant’s growth and maturation cycles. Cannabis ERP systems are extremely effective at helping root out any redundancies and eliminating manual workarounds. By implementing a cannabis industry-specific ERP solution, you’re able to achieve all of these and stay accountable to the requirements of operating a growing business.
