It’s 2019, legal cannabis is becoming the norm, and we’re seeing some of the most impressive advancements in science and technology happening in this industry, especially in cultivation facilities. So why are many commercial growers still using whiteboards and notebooks to track and record data?
Now’s the time to get out of the dark ages and get digital! I can’t think of a more antiquated tool to be used in the most progressive and hyped industry since.. ever. The cannabis industry is maturing and it’s time for the tools used by commercial cannabis cultivators to grow up too. Here are just some of the problems with using whiteboards as an organizational tool:
No Historical Data:
Using whiteboards to record conditions or assign tasks means that at the end of the day or week, all of that data is erased and gone forever. Having digital, historical data allows you to evaluate successful, and not so successful, batches and determine what caused the outcome. Although whiteboards and notebooks have been the status quo for decades, these tools are inadequate for commercial scale operations.
Even for smaller scale growers, if you’re interested in learning from the past, you need to be tracking data digitally. Look for software built for this exact purpose, that will graph data over time, offer helpful analytics, or create custom reports. Also, you’ll want to find software that correlates all of your cultivation data together, because there are so many intertwined variables that can impact harvests.
Limited Access to Data:
Information on a whiteboard is only valuable to those standing directly in front of the whiteboard. This may strike you as obvious, but anyone who works in a commercial cannabis facility can tell you that they’re BUSY. People are jumping through hoops just to run a compliant business and any service that’s convenient will win. Tracking conditions, light cycles, and daily activities in an app is far more convenient than a whiteboard.
With an software like Trym, you’ll always know where your plants are, what the current conditions are, and what your team’s up to. You won’t need to walk around and search all of this info out yourself.
Not Competitive:
The cannabis market has attracted massive amounts of attention and as a result has become highly competitive. If you’re looking for a way to differentiate your business, beyond growing premium flower (because there’s a lot of that), getting your internal processes dialed in and stepping things up with new technology is a great way to compete and thrive.
By using software to track data across your operation, you’ll get a comprehensive view of productivity and can begin to understand how different activities affect things like yield and profitability. Through data collection and analysis, growers can begin to tweak their process to either reduce costs, increase yields, or even manipulate terpene profiles (probably the most exciting)!
Historical data is valuable – especially when collected and organized in a way that’s easy to interpret. Having reliable, digital data means that you can analyze and learn from it. Make changes; improvements; experiment and tweak things. You can’t easily learn from data recorded in a notebook or on a whiteboard. By combining data collection and analysis into one automated process, the data you collect is immediately useful. So it’s time to upgrade those old-school tools!
What’s great about Trym software, is that you get the added bonus of analytics just by using the app to monitor conditions and tasks. We take the data collected from environmental sensors and user inputs and analyze it for our customers – because we know growers are busy.
Every business can benefit from data analytics. You can improve your production quality, optimize for cost reduction, or geek-out on cool stuff like what environmental conditions your different strains prefer. Data is power and now’s the time to tap into the potential of your cultivation data to increase your competitive edge and sustain the changing tides of legal cannabis.
