Using Tech to Increase Employee Health and Safety

From cultivators to dispensaries, cannabis operators are required to get creative and deploy new ways to manage day-to-day business activities as the coronavirus pandemic shapes the “new normal”.

While some have seen an increase in demand, others are facing tough decisions when it comes to production and staff. Either way, cannabis companies are doing everything they can to avoid furloughing staff.

No matter the situation, it’s important to make data driven decisions. That’s why many are turning to cannabis-specific technology to better manage their operations. With the right tools in place, cannabis operators have been able to alter protocols and adjust processes to keep employees safe and maintain an efficient workflow.

From plants to people, here are the key adjustments taken by the industry that can greatly impact your business:

Labor Planning

Many cannabis operators are turning to reduced staff and staggered schedules. This is a necessary step for the health and safety of employees, but if not done properly, can be detrimental to production.

Making data driven staffing decisions is crucial to ensuring staff and inventory levels remain healthy. Arbitrarily splitting staff and staggering shifts can result in under or over staffing, ultimately affecting revenue in either case. Fortunately, the latest cannabis technology takes all the guess work out of labor planning.

Cannabis ERP software has built in labor planning, maximizing staff efficiencies. Tracking all cultivation and/or processing activities in one place, operators can look at upcoming activities to determine the minimum hours required to meet production needs.

Automatic Inventory Replenishment Notifications

To prevent bottlenecks and maximize production, automatic inventory replenishment notifications are vital to keeping a cannabis operation running efficiently. Production facilities and shipping times have been greatly impacted by the current pandemic, making buffer time vital to inventory replenishment.

For example, imagine a multi-state, vertically integrated cannabis operation. Everything is running smoothly from the cultivation sites, to the processing facilities, down to the dispensaries. The processing manager is about to start a new batch of tinctures and notices there aren’t enough bottles. When they go to order more bottles, they see the bottles are on back order for 6 to 8 weeks. This creates a huge bottleneck in the supply chain.

Automatic inventory replenishment notifications ensure all your materials, cannabis and non-cannabis alike, are in stock. With a true cannabis ERP software, all work orders, materials, and labor are housed in a single system. This allows managers to easily set notifications by minimum stock levels with lead times based on scarcity for a healthy supply chain.

Accessibility

While social distancing requirements are quite easy to put in place, shared devices can throttle these no-contact efforts. The ability to access and input data surrounding business-critical processes is essential to maintaining real-time information, reducing errors, and increasing productivity.

When looking at efficiencies and safety, accessibility should be a top priority. Business management tools should be accessible from any device. Not only does this reduce the number of employees interacting with the same machine, it also eliminates the need for employees to travel outside of a designated workspace. 

Integration into Automation

The latest and greatest in automation delivers the opportunity to keep employees safe while maintaining a steady and efficient supply chain. From advanced environmental control systems to click and collect and self-service kiosks, automation tools connect directly into business management softwares to provide real-time data.

Not only will these automation tools reduce health and safety risks, they also provide an unmatched level of cost savings. Reducing manual labor, creating uniform products, and eliminating inefficiencies greatly improves the overall supply chain.

Health and safety of employees will continue to be the highest priority for cannabis employers for the foreseeable future. Cannabis operators around the world are looking to technology to provide data driven decisions, maximize efficiencies, and boost productivity.