The cannabis industry continues to evolve rapidly in 2019, along with it, so should your perception of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and related applications. As a business begins to grow and scale, disparate systems create new challenges and overhead costs that impact your ability to scale profitably. With the intense regulatory and compliance focus placed on the cannabis industry, often the optimal path to growth is to narrow your search to a comprehensive solution that helps eliminate silos and enables your employees to work more efficiently with less overhead to manage linking systems and software.

Because every company is unique, there’s no single indicator that can suggest precisely when you might need an ERP software solution. However, discovering inefficiencies and road blocks in current business processes may suggest converting to an ERP system. Within this article, we will briefly cover why the implementation of an ERP software will grow your canna-business in 2019.

Done right, Cannabis ERP makes your teams more efficient at day to day operations and provides a tremendous reduction in time spent on audit and compliance related activities.

Establishing the need for a new ERP

The most important aspect before implementing an ERP system into your organization is understanding the strategy of your business processes. Focusing on the people and operations rather than the technology will give you insight as to what the core issues are, and what the ERP software can resolve. Whether your organization is struggling with accurate data from sales, cannabis compliance tracking, inventory costing or accurate accounting information, it can trigger a ripple effect on everything from marketing to payroll, from investment to employee retention. As you realize these symptoms are occurring in your business, it becomes imperative to address them cohesively to allow for stability and growth.

What ERP can do for your cannabis business

Although the regulation of marijuana still seems to be a topic of variability between states, the development of technology surrounding the industry is constantly growing. If you’re a serious cannabis operator and you need a software system for your manufacturing and cultivation operations, an ERP software platform geared for the cannabis industry is what your company needs to stay compliant.

Traditional ERP is an enterprise resource planning tool that is used to organize business tasks throughout an organization in a cohesive software program. These essential management tools include planning, purchasing, inventory, sales, costing, finance, etc. By combining management of these departments into a connected program, businesses can realize operational efficiency and profitability by lowering costs and decreasing waste in time, labor, and inventory. Ensuring the solutions you pursue are focused on regulatory and compliance requirements for your state and municipality are imperative to ease of growth. The last thing a business would need when facing an ERP implementation is worries about integrating with external solutions for compliance and grow/recipe management.

Beginning Your Search

Once recognizing that a comprehensive Cannabis ERP solution is what your business needs to make it to the next level, it is time to begin serious planning around the selection of your ERP provider. After assessing the pain points within your current business processes, you must make time to undertake an honest top-to-bottom look at all your current administrative tasks. Think of this as a shopping list that you will be referencing as you evaluate ERP options.

• Process Mapping: Use the early part of the sales process to network with providers and understand their specific approach to implementation. Gain an understanding of where solutions have to evolve to match a human process, and where human processes must change to match the software. These two facets are critical to a successful implementation. At the same time, your team can establish rapport and understand what will and won’t work with particular providers and solutions. Taking this step early will help educate your team before you enter into any type of RFP process, which tends to be cumbersome and confusing to those who haven’t purchased an ERP solution before.
• Document your needs: Putting your needs into words will help create an RFP framework for your ERP needs. This allows your business to be more satisfied with the answers from potential software companies. Be thorough in outlining your needs to shape the kind of product you need to receive because this will determine the future of your company. See step 1 if you’re not clear though. It is imperative that you compare similar solutions and approaches, and be prepared to challenge responses that seem vague or elusive.
• Evaluate Objectively: This is where your prior planning pays off, with a good scoring matrix and good search methodology. In a young industry like the Cannabis space, bigger names may or may not have true industry expertise that fits well with your team and business. Cannabis expertise and compliance functionality is essential for your business to gain from utilizing ERP.

Have questions? Want to learn more about how ERP can benefit Cannabis Business Management? Contact us today for more information. Quantum Leaf specializes in Cannabis Software.

Why Choose Acumatica Customer Management?

If your business focus is on managing relationships with suppliers, distributors, partners, customers and prospects, Acumatica provides a best-of-breed approach that limits the unnecessary cost and complexity of integrating with additional CRM platforms.

#1 ERP and CRM that work together. Customer Management (also called Customer Relationship Management) was built into Acumatica from the very beginning. It is not a loosely integrated module like so many other midmarket ERP products. From marketing, quoting, and sales to delivery and post-sales support, customer information is always up to date and accurate.

#2 Integrated content management. Acumatica provides a consolidated view of all customer records in a single database. This access to all written quotes, invoices, and support cases provides to every member of your team a 360-degree view of all customer activities and records.

# 3 Visibility. Dashboards and reports provide real-time sales data to help your team manage forecasts, quotas, and results. Efficiently communicate and collaborate with customers through the Acumatica Customer Portal. Helpful tools give customers access to information about their interaction with your company and enable activities online.

See Acumatica CRM in Action

Take a look at the platform in action and see how the integrated interface makes training employees on a single platform easier. With full access to ERP data, you’re never stuck waiting on data transfers from external platform integrations and are ready to manage to up to the date information with all of your contacts. Acumatica is true Cloud CRM that provides robust functionality to improve the interactions your teams have with customers, suppliers, distributors and contacts.

Improving CRM adoption, productivity, and outcomes

There are a number of reasons for businesses to avoid buying into a separate CRM platform that go well beyond the cost of licensing the additional platform. Most notably, the timeliness of information availability makes your reps better in their interactions with customers, suppliers, partners and distributors. Acumatica’s integration capability allows you to extend functionality to additional applications where necessary, yet the robust CRM capability helps you avoid having to make that integration your first move.

Acumatica is an enterprise resource planning software that was designed to incorporate CRM tools as integral elements of the core system and not merely add-on. Armed with a suite of application features, Acumatica ensures accuracy in marketing, sales-to-delivery, customer service and post-sales support. Access to data is particularly easier with Acumatica single, integrated database.

One constant in the world of CRM implementation: Adoption is the key to successful implementation of CRM. Ease-of-use should be considered as the main feature while getting a CRM. In fact, low adoption rates are the primary cause for the failure of CRM. By utilizing a robust CRM application within your Acumatica ERP platform, you eliminate the need for reps to log into a different cloud system. The same application being used for order management can provide contact data for your next call, which is then logged into the CRM platform. Your users avoid the complexity of hopping between browser screens to service customers and prospects in a quick and easy manner.

Pipeline management and workflow driven lead management help salespeople remain efficient and productive. With an easy to use Outlook add-in, your emails can be easily moved into the CRM platform eliminating extra steps for sales and customer service, while at the same time increasing usage of the platform.

Want to learn more about Acumatica CRM? Contact us today at 866-713-7877 to learn more.

Passed in 2016, the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most significant legislative change in European data protection laws since the EU Data Protection Directive (Directive 95/46/EC), introduced in 1995. Effective May 25, 2018, the GDPR seeks to strengthen the security and protection of personal data in the EU and serve as a single piece of legislation for all of the EU. It will replace the EU Data Protection Directive and all the local laws relating to it.

This new regulation broadly affects all organizations, government agencies, and companies throughout the world that collect or use personal data tied to EU residents. It affects European and non-European businesses using online advertising and measurement solutions when their sites and apps are accessed by users in the European Economic Area (EEA). Not only is the GDPR an important step in protecting the fundamental right of privacy for European citizens, it also raises the bar for data protection, security and compliance in the industry.

Acumatica supports and complies with the GDPR. As these new GDPR requirements become a reality, organizations using cloud applications worldwide should be aware of their data privacy and security needs relating to their collection and handling of personal information.

Key GDPR Requirements for SaaS Customers

As the new GDPR requirements become a reality, organizations using cloud applications worldwide should be aware of their data privacy and security needs relating to their collection and handling of personal information. Here are four key requirements Acumatica is highlighting:

For more information from Acumatica, please visit: https://www.acumatica.com/gdpr-and-acumatica-compliance/

Looking for cannabis management software? You’ve come to the right place. Quantum Leaf and Acumatica have a tremendous partnership, based on excellent cloud technology and industry know-how. Increase your business compliance and productivity today.