As greater numbers of states begin to legalize medicinal and recreational marijuana, the cannabis growth industry has exploded. Still, despite experiencing such significant developments in a condensed time period, this industry still has room to improve. Each grow brings with it a unique set of challenges based on factors that include:
- The size of the operation
- Jurisdictional requirements
- The diversity of the product offering
One consistent pain point that is hindering the productivity of most cannabis growths is a lack of adequate cultivation management software. By adopting proper cannabis grow software, your business can tap into its true potential, increase its productivity and improve product quality, thus better serving its valued customers.
If you’re still on the fence about giving up your tried-and-true cannabis cultivation management processes in place of modern cannabis grow technology, we invite you to join us as we explore three ways in which cannabis grow software increases production and profitability.
What Is Cannabis Grow Software?
The terms “cannabis grow software” and “cannabis grow technology” are broad terms that encompass any applications, digital tools, or platforms that facilitate the management of cannabis growth operations.
In other words, cannabis grow software acts as a digital resource you can use to oversee your growing business. Solutions may include applications, workflow management tools, reporting tools, task-tracking capabilities, email or text-based alert systems, and much more.
With cannabis grow technology, you can:
- Automate work
- Manage teams
- Track schedules
- Analyze harvests
- Gain meaningful business insights
- Overcome growth hurdles
Before the rise of dedicated cannabis grow software, most cultivators attempted to manage their businesses using solutions that were not purpose-built for the cannabis industry. A few examples included spreadsheet software, accounting tools, and scheduling applications. The end result was cobbled-together networks of disjointed technologies that produced admittedly good outcomes, but outcomes with vast room for improvement nonetheless.
Chances are that your current technology stack looks something like the scenario described above. If that’s the case, then you likely know that your retrofitted technologies get the job done but hardly facilitate optimized growth management. In fact, your mismatched array of technologies could be impeding your business growth as much as it facilitates it.
Fortunately, the rise of cannabis grow technology offers a much better alternative than your current solution.
Cannabis Grow Software vs. Cannabis Grow Technology
Before we take a deeper dive into the downfalls of traditional cannabis growth management practices and outline how modern tech can help you boost production, it’s important to clarify the distinction between tech and software.
Generally speaking, cannabis grow software falls under the larger umbrella of cannabis grow technology. In other words, cannabis grow software is a form of cannabis grow technology. On the other hand, the term “cannabis grow technology” may refer to solutions, including physical devices such as sensors that gather field data about your harvest, not just software.
Currently, most cannabis grow technology centers around operations management software. However, as the landscape of cannabis grow technology continues to mature, these software solutions will likely be integrated with sensors, edge computing devices like harvesting equipment, and other physical objects.
The combination of robust software and front-line cannabis grow technology will enable harvesters to maximize yields and optimize profitability.
Downfalls of Traditional Cannabis Grow Management
Traditional cannabis growth management processes have numerous drawbacks, any one of which can impede business development. Some of the most notable downfalls associated with antiquated grow management processes include the following:
Lack of Oversight
If you want to be able to effectively manage your business, you must have full visibility over your operations, performance, and productivity. With that being said, unfortunately, a lack of oversight and information blind spots are two of the most common challenges that arise when using outdated growth management processes.
Without dedicated cannabis grow software, you’ll have to rely on a combination of disconnected technologies and manual task management processes, and since these solutions cannot share or exchange information, blind spots are bound to form. As a result, you might receive information long after it is useful, if you receive it at all.
Actionable, relevant, and timely data is critical to the decision-making process, so if you do not have access to quality data, you will not be able to effectively make informed decisions for your business. Instead, you’ll practically be working in the dark, causing you to miss out on opportunities to adjust and optimize your operations.
Poor Communication Between Shifts/Teams
Cultivating quality cannabis is a 24/7 endeavor. You must constantly monitor your plants, control every variable, and consistently care for your crops if you want to maximize their yields. Still, despite managing your business being a round-the-clock process, you cannot physically oversee (or reasonably be expected to oversee) every aspect of your operations yourself.
It’s why you have developed teams of staff members and put knowledgeable supervisory staff in place, but when there are miscommunications between these individuals, the results can range from slightly inconvenient to catastrophic, depending on the severity of the mishap,
Therefore, it is vital that you create consistent workflow management practices and establish clear lines of communication, which will facilitate a seamless pass-down of information between shifts, supervisors, teams, and departments. As you are probably well aware, though, establishing clear, frictionless communication across your entire business can be incredibly difficult, if not impossible.
Fortunately, you can simplify this process by transitioning to cannabis grow software. The best cannabis grow technology will feature communication tools that allow you to assign tasks, receive real-time updates, and distribute information to your entire team.
Inadequate Efficiency
If you want to increase the productivity of your grow operations, you need to ensure that every shift is adequately staffed; otherwise, your efficiency will suffer, and the business will struggle to prosper.
With that being said, however, if you are manually creating growing schedules and shift schedules, you’re already setting yourself up for failure. No matter how meticulous you may be, there will eventually be discrepancies between your schedules, which can result in a shift being understaffed or a crop being harvested either too late or too early.
Schedule management and tracking are integral components of business efficiency, and if you prioritize these mission-critical tasks, you will be able to increase efficiency, improve overall output, and ensure that your valued staff has the resources they need to be successful.
Minimal Actionable Insights
Think back to a harvest that had a particularly robust yield of product. Did your current growth management processes enable you to document every detail of that harvest so that you could create a repeatable growing strategy? If you are using traditional grow management strategies, the answer is very likely “no.”
Therein lies one of the greatest challenges associated with grow management: When you rely on technologies that were not built for this industry, you gain minimal actionable insights about harvests, production levels, or operational efficiency in general.
That is one of the key value propositions of cannabis grow software. The best solution will allow you to analyze every harvest right down to the last variable, ensuring that you know which adjustments produced desirable results and which actions might have decreased crop yield.
Each strain of cannabis grows best under slightly different conditions. Therefore, you must tailor your growing strategy for each strain based on factors like its resiliency, need for sunlight, and demand for water. With cannabis grow software, you can analyze every harvest and create repeatable processes that will produce consistently high yields, season after season.
Tedious, Time-Consuming Documentation Practices
After a harvest, how long does your team spend documenting the yield of each plant group and documenting other business-critical activities? Chances are that you have dozens of labor hours invested just toward documenting details about each harvest. Imagine how much more productive your staff could be if these processes were automated using modern technologies.
Relying on tedious and time-consuming documentation practices accomplishes nothing but wasting your precious resources, and it prevents your staff from engaging in more value-oriented activities.
Manual documentation practices are also incredibly frustrating. No one likes toiling away for hours in an attempt to customize and organize numerous spreadsheets or physical logs. They’re not just frustrating for staff either: They can be a burden to your business altogether, especially due to the heavily regulated nature of the cannabis industry.
Paper logs and generic spreadsheets do create an auditable trail of sorts, but keeping up with these logs can be a full-time job in and of itself. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could automate all of this while simultaneously generating a meticulous, auditable trail for compliance purposes? With cannabis grow software, you can do exactly that.
How Does Cannabis Grow Technology Increase Production?
After exploring the downfalls of standard growth management practices, you are probably ready to toss your log books out the window and implement the best cannabis grow software you can find. We can hardly blame you, as investing in cannabis grow technology will benefit your business and increase production in the following ways:
Providing Actionable Insights
If a harvest underproduces, it is important that you can pinpoint precisely why that is. On the other hand, if one of your harvests produces a huge yield, you should be able to trace every step you took to maintain that crop.
While it is impossible to derive actionable insights from traditional business management practices, you can track, monitor, and review every harvest using cannabis grow software. Such technology will enable you to schedule harvests, track maintenance activities, assign tasks, and do much more.
After each harvest, you can input yield data into your platform and generate detailed reports. You can customize these reports to gain insights about things such as total seasonal yield, strain-specific output, and other factors.
These reporting tools are not only great for internal purposes, either, as you can use the reports generated as a means of keeping investors or shareholders in the loop or demonstrating how you deliver value to clients.
The bottom line is that cannabis grow software will empower you to improve business transparency, efficiency, and productivity.
Improving Communication Between Staff
On the subject of making improvements, cannabis grow software will also enable you to streamline communication between your staff. All authorized team members will be able to access your unified cannabis grow management platform, which they can use as a single source of truth to track tasks, review the harvesting schedule, get up to speed on tasks performed by the previous shift, and communicate with other staff members.
The communication capabilities of a top-end cannabis grow software solution will have your harvesting business operating like a well-oiled machine. You will no longer encounter persistent communication issues or have crop yields hindered by miscues between shifts.
Your software’s communication tools will also promote collaboration between shifts and enhance staff morale, as your team will be able to more effectively carry out their responsibilities and access the support they need from other staff members.
Facilitating End-to-End Grow Management
If you’re tired of transitioning between multiple applications and software solutions as you navigate the growth management process, then that makes for just one more reason why you should consider investing in cannabis grow software.
With cannabis grow technology, you can manage your entire harvesting process from end to end, meaning you will no longer have to rely on half a dozen (or more) platforms to track and manage your harvests.
The best solutions include interactive calendars, harvest scheduling tools, analysis capabilities, task tracking tools, and more. Cumulatively, these tools enable you to see and manage everything that needs to be done today and months in the future.
Why Use PlanaCan Cannabis Grow Technology?
If you’re ready to embrace the most innovative and dynamic scheduling software for cultivators, it is time to implement PlanaCan. With PlanaCan, you can enjoy higher yields, less stress, and total operational visibility.
PlanaCan allows you to stay connected from anywhere, whether in the office, out in the field, or away from your facility altogether. We have a dynamic desktop application that will become your unified growth management solution. We also offer user-friendly mobile applications that function flawlessly with smartphones and tablets.
If you want to experience the difference that is PlanaCan, we invite you to schedule a demonstration or contact our team today. Once you see our product in action, you will wonder why you ever did business without it.
