Seed-To-Sale And Regulation-Compliant: Creating Business Sustainability In The Cannabis Industry

By Hardeep Shoker, Chief Product Officer, Elevated Signals

The slow end of cannabis prohibition has been a great blessing to the industry, but legitimacy brings with it a host of unique challenges. Going from a business where recordkeeping was informal or even discouraged, to instead become a major agricultural, pharmaceutical, and retail industry, means quickly adopting new standards for efficiency, accountability, and most of all, sustainability — the overall resilience and continuity of a business built to last through years of crisis, maintenance, and growth.

The most difficult thing about such an adjustment is the sweeping change necessary across the entire industry. When the cannabis market first took off as a legitimate business, we had only around 50 license-holders to deal with; now there are over 700, creating an incredible wealth of choices for distributors and retailers, but also leading to fierce competition and analysis paralysis from so many options. So what does long-term sustainability mean for cannabis business owners, and what are the steps we must take to reach this goal and ensure optimized processes from seed to sale? 

Demand for supply

Supply chain management is an absolute must for sustainability in the cannabis industry. Companies must be both capital efficient and smart about how they deploy their resources, especially as COVID-19 has hit the market viciously and made capital harder to come by. Cannabis business leaders are constantly having to make important decisions such as whether purchasing pre-roll machines would improve operational efficiency enough to be worth the investment, whether to invest in more warehouse space, and whether to sell off excess stock to acquire more capital when it is scarce. Decisions like these can only be successfully made if supported by data which is — more often than not — spread across multiple locations and stakeholders. From the growers and processors working on the facility floor, through to QA, sales, and finance teams, each area of the business will have its own recordkeeping system. This slows down the data consolidation process which in turn cripples the business’s ability to make data-driven decisions that would help it survive and thrive. 

This inefficiency creates a massive labour effort throughout the cannabis industry. Any given company relies on records scattered across various media: pen-and-paper forms, receipts, batch binders, spreadsheets, SharePoint, Google Docs, and many more play host to the story of a given company’s business. And while there’s nothing wrong with these tools, spreading everything over various sources means spending needless time and employee effort bringing them together to guide decisions. This disorganized approach makes it impossible to have a holistic understanding of what is happening at any given facility, let alone across an entire business. Auditing and inspections become arduous, while tracking the cost and production of goods likewise becomes untenable. If companies are always paying too many people to chase a reasonable understanding of their product, they will always be running behind: a status quo that is literally unsustainable. 

Sustainability through software

By now it should be clear that the key to ongoing business sustainability and success is software that brings all of the disparate sources of data from across a company together, instantly creating that precious top-down view of its operations that takes so long to produce with scattered sources. Employees would enter their information and processes into a single, unified source, and the software would collate it all; both to provide leaders with visibility and to mine data for business insights. Installing and integrating one company-wide software suite could turn an unsustainable endeavor into a perpetual motion machine. 

The problem is that not all productivity software is created equal, and certainly not all for the same industry. Cannabis is its own field with its own highly specific needs, such that cannabis professionals at any stage from production to retail cannot simply grab any generic productivity suite and get to work. Cannabis companies need software developed specifically for the cannabis industry. This means not only understanding the exact and evolving demands of the cannabis seed-to-sale journey, but ensuring compliance with the many, varied, and changing regulations and best practices that determine both the health of a business and the legality of its operations.

The ideal software solution for cannabis business sustainability is thus one that combines comprehensive seed-to-sale recordkeeping with an ongoing commitment to comply with business standards and laws. Business leaders should look to partner with software companies that make agile cannabis B2B software the core of their enterprise, rather than a generic business software suite that cannot ever anticipate the needs of our particular and highly regulated vertical. By jettisoning out-of-date analog recording systems and implementing forward-thinking enterprise software solutions that keep up with changing standards, cannabis businesses can create a sustainable, agile approach to a competitive market. 

Hardeep Shoker is the CPO and co-founder of Elevated Signals, a company that develops software for cannabis producers. Day-to-day, Hardeep helps Licensed Producers get the most out of their teams by leveraging technology to streamline operations, while still staying in compliance. With over 14 years of experience in software development, he is passionate about bringing technical best practices from other industries and applying them to the cannabis space, in order to help the market become sustainable from both an operating and business perspective.