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Many farmers and entrepreneurs jump into the cannabis industry seeing dollar signs, but they don’t realize the intricacies of compliance or scaling up and how quickly companies can get into trouble. As more and more states come online, an industry scaling this rapidly needs technology tools for automation and workflow planning.

Cannabis industry leaders across the country, and even some of the largest vertically integrated operators, have confessed that they are still using an amalgamation of old technologies and systems such as white boards, email, Google docs, and spreadsheets to manage their workflow and teams. While this may have worked for past generations, the expanding industry now calls for growers to also be retailers who need to maintain compliance with various state guidelines, and that simply can’t be done from a white board.

The cannabis industry, while experiencing growth, is still a freshly budding sector of many states’ economies, therefore, there are very few software tools established to help cannabis operators with their needs to get them from seed to sale. Business leaders are forced to use a mashup of software systems that aren’t built specifically for cannabis. There is a missing piece of any single system that could provide true analytics and real-time data for cannabis operators to make fact and trend-based planning decisions.

The story of Regrow, a new software aimed at helping cannabis companies maintain compliance and become more automated, comes from a group of executives from different parts of the cannabis industry coming together and sharing their grievances about this lack of vertically integrated technology tools—and then brainstorming solutions.

Getting Off the White Board and Into the Cloud

With a background that includes growing one of the largest software development companies in the world and direct experience with the old school methods of growing and distributing cannabis, the executives at Regrow saw that there was a need for the cannabis industry to be brought up to speed, technologically speaking.

In any consumer-facing industry, business leaders need insight into raw materials, product packaging, bill of materials requirements, and inventory needs to meet forecasted business demands. Cannabis industry leaders, as in other sectors, can benefit from having a single system that encompasses metrics and performance analytics to help them run their business efficiently. Such automated systems can help identify inefficiencies and take corrective actions to maximize sales.

In an industry that continues to expand, these needs only continue to grow, and software is required to help at every stage of the process: cultivation, packaging, marketing, and especially compliance and sales. According to Regrow’s CEO, Rob Woodbyrne, this new software is the only one of its kind in the cannabis industry that allows for cloud-based operations that assist businesses with these automations.

Keep the Government From Coming for You

Compliance is a serious issue for the cannabis industry. Cannabis executives have little wiggle room in an ever-changing regulatory environment, but it’s impossible to be compliant using outdated tracking tools.

While fears for growers may have once included criminal enterprises, they now face a threat from the federal government. For cannabis industry executives, compliance breakdowns can lead to anything from jail time to millions of dollars in crops being burned by federal authorities.

The cannabis industry needs automation to avoid human error, which leads to risks that could be detrimental to operations. Regrow, according to Woodbryne, helps industry executives meet compliance requirements with automated standard operating procedure(SOP) workflows and compliance tracking, targeted state-by-state with adjustments for different programs.

 

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