MJBiz - January/February 2024 - 34

SEED TO SALE
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Order # 2024 - 01 - 0289001
it to someone who made it into
something who sold it to someone
else, we could still trace that back
to the exact date that I created that
plant, potentially a year prior, "
Gamble said.
Mueller noted that, in his
experience with BioTrack and Metrc,
there is little difference between the
two track-and-trace systems.
" It's pretty much apples to
apples, " Mueller said. " All of that
functionality is identical. And
the way we tag plants is almost
identical. We're producing relatively
the exact same products in all
markets, depending on their regs.
But those tags and the seed-to-sale
tracking is 99% the same. "
Mueller noted, however, that
many of his employees prefer one
system over the other because of
a more user-friendly interface or
better and faster customer service,
which can be important.
WEIGHING SOLUTIONS
Gamble said Metrc does a good
job tracking plants, their growth,
harvests and so on. But it doesn't
have a wholesale module or a
financial module or any " ERP
type of functionalities that
manufacturing companies typically
want. "
Rather than buying an ERP system
to fill those holes, Native Sun built
its own ERP tools that it integrated
with Metrc and that " interact with
the Metrc data. "
Native Sun takes the data
generated by Metrc and feeds it
into the ERP tools custom-built
by Native Sun. Those tools analyze
the data and provide reports that
help Native Sun plan production,
manage logistics, sell products
wholesale, transfer products to their
own stores or analyze the cost of
manufacturing.
" The information about the
plants, the inventory, the products,
In most states that use Metrc, seed-to-sale tracking tags cost operators
25-45 cents each, depending on whether they are affixed to cannabis plants
or finished products. Photo by Morgan Miller
all of that is stored and manipulated
in Metrc, " Gamble explained.
He believes it was better to build
an internal ERP solution rather than
buy one.
" The more full-scale-production
ERPs are very expensive ... and they
require significant implementation
costs and challenges of training staff
on complicated data procedures.
The (process) to get an entire
organization of people to start
accurately working on a much more
complicated piece of software can
be very challenging. The industry
is very tough right now. Keeping
things simple sometimes has
positive benefits for us, " Gamble
said.
Deep Roots Harvest, a vertically
integrated cannabis company
in Nevada, takes a similarly
light approach to what software
it integrates with Metrc on the
cultivation side of the business.
" We've chosen not to do direct
integration. Ours is a fairly manual
process, at least in the back of the
house, " said Jon Marshall, chief
operating officer at Deep Roots.
" What Metrc doesn't do is costing
(forecasting the cost of a product
34 January-February 2024 | MJBizMagazine
or service). It's a very off-the-shelf
solution to inventory tracking, but
it doesn't give you all the detail you
need for a business. "
To fill those holes, Deep Roots
looked at ERP solutions from various
companies-including BioTrack and
MJFreeway, which also offer those
types of solutions. Ultimately, the
company went with a tailor-made
solution that included creating and
developing its own internal database
and then purchasing software
from Colorado-based app-building
platform TrackVia.
" It's basically like a citizendevelopment
(created by non-IT
experts) software package that
allows you to build these supercomprehensive
databases. And
what it allowed us to do is not
only handle the cultivation and
production, inventory tracking and
all those tasks and all those different
things, but it also allowed us to do
things like facility management
and transport requests-and it
became this much more powerful
ERP. Then, we could really solve
a lot of other non-marijuanarelated
problems in addition to the
inventory-tracking side. "
CANNABIS
MJBiz - January/February 2024

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