Although the legal cannabis industry has come a long way from its wild early days, the market seems to be struggling to take its next big leap forward. To be successful, or even just compliant, operators often must use a series of complex platforms to keep up with inventory management, seed-to-sale oversight, recall readiness, and more. Fortunately, CannaBusiness ERP provides a single enterprise resource platform (ERP) to help operators with all these tasks so they can focus on growth.
CannaBusiness ERP’s parent company, NexTec, has spent more than two decades introducing industry-specific technologies to help organizations in multiple sectors scale and prosper. NexTec routinely keeps its eye on emerging industries, and the company eventually noticed cannabis businesses were not always operating at their full potential.
“Back in 2018, as more states legalized the recreational use of cannabis, it was clear the industry was struggling with rapid growth and there were very few customized solutions built to address the challenges of multistate cannabis operators,” said Ron Fallert, vice president of sales at NexTec. “We decided to enter the market using our experience in customizing Sage X3 for the food-and-beverage industry. CannaBusiness ERP is built to help cannabis [multistate operators] overcome challenges around compliance, product quality, operational efficiency, and scalability.”
While compliance is a main component of the software, CannaBusiness ERP offers much more, especially when it comes to inventory management. The platform can coordinate inventory across multiple warehouse locations and even automate orders. And while no one is excited for product recalls, they are a reality for every industry. CannaBusiness ERP provides product-recall-readiness features that allow users to search for products that may have been recalled, freeze the impacted inventory, and ensure it is not sold to the public. The platform also helps operators easily identify areas where they can reduce costs associated with inventory, including the costs of specific plant strains.
Inventory management is crucial, but so is ensuring the quality of every product on retail shelves. CannaBusiness ERP gives operators the confidence they are maintaining only high-caliber products in their inventory. The platform dives deep into the data and, according to Fallert, can provide insight into “controls that help multistate operators standardize quality-control measures across businesses to keep track of data about product quality and create a common database for this essential information.” The software allows operators to track product metrics, including test data from every harvest, to ensure quality and consistency.
Inventory management obviously is about optimizing what can be sold but, ideally, it also involves reducing waste. “Functionality in CannaBusiness ERP accurately accounts for waste for both inventory management and regulatory reporting purposes,” Fallert said. “With this visibility into where waste is occurring, business leaders can adjust operations as needed to reduce the effect on their bottom lines.”
CannaBusiness ERP also helps businesses record how they dispose of production byproducts, making it much easier to track this key component of compliance. “Our development team recently added functionality around waste methods that allows customers in states without a mandated solution such as BioTrack or Metrc to set up a list of waste methods and tag the proper option as they process their waste,” Fallert explained. “This allows businesses to record how they dispose of byproducts of cannabis production, which all regulations require.”
The entire seed-to-sale process can be difficult to keep up with, but CannaBusiness ERP users gain valuable perspective every step of the way. “CannaBusiness ERP tracks everything, so as the solution manages each department and process, it also works to collect all data associated with each activity, giving business leaders clear visibility into the entire business,” Fallert said.
CannaBusiness ERP’s seed-to-sale functionality also can:
- Manage plant scheduling, production, and processing with full traceability and real-time access to operational and financial insights.
- Utilize production scheduling and quality-control functionality to manage continuous cultivation operations.
- Maximize efficiency and output by integrating an entire business into a single purpose-built platform.
Fallert said one of his company’s primary goals is to help cannabis entities become more flexible and better at predicting demand. New products and markets constantly come online and regulations can change on a dime, so companies need to be prepared.
“With accurate forecasting and complete visibility provided by CannaBusiness ERP, companies are better positioned to respond to changes in demand and adapt operations to save money and ensure success,” he said.
