Cannabis cultivation software is more important than ever. Legalization has given cannabis cultivators a lot more to think about than simply the quality of their flowers, and they are quickly finding out that operating a fully legal business is no small feat.
One of fastest ways to create a thriving grow operation is to adopt a business software package that’s intuitive to a cultivator’s needs. Let’s dig deeper into the 5 most important functions of a cannabis cultivation software platform, and why BLAZE is the clear choice for growers.
Serves the Needs of Every Role
Many software platforms think a single interface can work for everyone at the same company, but that’s a stretch. Cultivators take care of plants while the sales and fulfillment team handles logistics, compliance, and manifests, among other tasks. These employees certainly work together, but they do completely opposite things.
“When you take a big enterprise resource planning platform that’s been used in a standard business and you try to shoehorn it into cultivation you end up with poor data entry, high training costs in time and money, and just a lower efficiency,” says Kai Kirk, Chief Product Officer at BLAZE.
BLAZE offers two distinct interfaces for cultivation — one just for the cultivators and plant-touching operations, and the other for managing salable product through their life cycle.
“It’s tough to run a good cultivation operation on just spreadsheets,” Kai says. “It’s even tougher running it on a software platform not built for cultivation from the ground up.”
Clean Interface Mimics Real Plant Workflow
Generally speaking, cannabis cultivators are not high-tech power users. And even if they are, BLAZE’s interface is designed for ease of use while giving growers clear visibility into the state of their plants, with both current and historic data.
“It’s critical for cultivators to have a very clean interface that provides the options to do exactly what they need to do in their day-to-day tasks, providing the information they need and the activities they need to perform easily with just a few clicks.” Kai says.
Deep Compliance Integration
Compliance is not an option. BLAZE understands this better than anyone, and that’s why the cannabis software platform is deeply integrated into all track-and-trace systems.
“We are tracking everything,” Kai says, “from the creation of your initial clones or seedlings to changes in your plant life cycle — through harvest, waste, drying — to your inventory creation and eventual transformation of that inventory into salable product, and finally to the creation of manifests within your local compliance system.”
This means cultivators can run their entire business within BLAZE’s cannabis cultivation software platform, a unique function that eliminates the need to manually create and file compliance manifests.
Powerful Sales Interface
All of the data that runs a cultivation business is built into BLAZE platform. That means inventory is up to date and accurate while sales orders and invoices are readily accessible, making it easy to adjust for taxes or discounts. And BLAZE compiles and reports all of this data to give cultivators a clear view of the health of their business. For cultivators who also distribute, this is especially crucial.
“You need a sales interface that’s powerful enough to allow you to transfer all of that information over to your distro through the application natively and not just through the track-and-trace system, which is only going to provide minimal details and require manual data entry,” Kai says. “If you’re on BLAZE and you’re sending from your cultivation to your distro, all of the product information is sent along with the compliance information.”
Transforming Raw Material into Salable Product
The initial product created by cultivators is often bulk flower or trim stored in large bags. and then converted into higher-margin inventory like eighths or pre-rolls. Yet most software solutions struggle with this conversion process, especially in the high-compliance environment of legal cannabis.
“BLAZE has a very easy process to create a new product,” Kai says. “It can pull flower from an existing, compliant package along with items from your non-cannabis inventory such as packing tubes for pre-rolls, papers, and tamper-resistant labeling. Now you have a new, compliant package from the prior package. If you don’t have this feature then you may have to go outside of your software platform to perform a conversion in your local track-and-trace system. Our platform is built from the ground up with the focus on inventory and how to manage that inventory.”
