710 Labs Gains Efficiency and Tackles Data Intelligence with Velosio Cannabis Solution

Background

At 710 Labs, the team prides themselves on the organically sourced inputs they feed their cannabis plants, as well as their intense care for the resin they produce. But don’t just take it from them — they let their product speak for itself. Headquartered in California, 710 Labs also has presence in Michigan, Colorado, and Florida and has earned a reputation as a small batch producer of a premium product.

710 Labs was utilizing Google Sheets and QuickBooks to manage its operations, along with a myriad of different Excel spreadsheets. The team was looking for improved efficiency, better data, and a better handle on material allocation. They wanted to learn: at any given time, what could they sell that week and in the future?

710 Labs was first introduced to Velosio through another cannabis client and colleague who was successfully partnered with Velosio. “When we first started talking to Velosio, we were looking for data centralization, reporting, and scalability,” says Scott Jolley, director of finance for Post Investment Group, the parent company of 710 Labs. “We knew we were going to expand to additional states, and bolting on another company would be challenging without a centralized software solution,” added Jolley.

Solution

710 Labs looked to Velosio to help with a solution which would solve these business challenges and more. Velosio recommended Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) with SilverLeaf to incorporate all the benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central combined with cannabis-specific features including product tracking, quality control, delivery compliance, and financial best practices. 710 is also utilizing LeafLink integration in Colorado, Continia Expense Management, Excel importer, and an Azure data lake for housing large volumes of data. “We shopped for a long time, but it was hard to find a solution which met all our requirements, as there are fewer options for the heavily regulated cannabis industry,” says Jolley. “We found that BC met the requirements of our different business units, and SilverLeaf had the full API integration with METRC and the cannabis functionality that we needed – it checked all the boxes,” continues Jolley.

Deployment

710 Labs and its parent company Post Investment Group decided to deploy the project in phases, with different go-live dates for its separate legal entities. “We learned a lot during the implementation,” says Jolley. “We thought we had scheduled a cushion of extra time, but in reality, entities needed time after go-live to enhance support, revisit functionality, and just work out some kinks,” adds Jolley.

710 Labs decided to build an internal ERP support team who could couple familiarity with internal organizational nuances and solution support. “We found that ongoing outsourced support would be expensive, but it has been challenging to recruit an internal ERP systems analyst,” says Jolley. “I do feel like we did a pretty good job staying on budget given our highly regulated, complex business requirements,” shares Jolley.

“We now have a consistent process, which has improved the overall health of our organization… We can now disseminate data effectively, and integration with other Microsoft products makes the process seamless. Reporting is much improved and standardized with a live feed to the source data.”

– Scott Jolley

Director of Finance, Post Investment Group

Benefits

The number one benefit of the solution is that 710 Labs now has a singular system, simplifying data collection across the board, while minimizing systems that the team must sign in to. Reporting is now streamlined, pulling information from Azure Data Lake into Power BI reports, and the team is much more efficient. Azure Data Lake solves many of the productivity and scalability challenges that prevents 710 Labs from maximizing the value of its data assets.

“We now have a consistent process, which has improved the overall health of our organization,” says Jolley. “We can now disseminate data effectively, and integration with other Microsoft products makes the process seamless. Reporting is much improved and standardized with a live feed to the source data. Production planning was spending many, many hours to compile data, and now that it’s automated, it saves many hours. We’ve seen labor savings, and I’d say the team is overall saner and more positive at work,” continues Jolley.

User acceptance is an ongoing process, with 130 users across three states. “It’s a constant battle to keep the data clean and remind users how it’s meant to be done while supporting them,” says Jolley. “Some people take shortcuts or workarounds, and it changes the reality of our data,” continues Jolley.

Future Plans for the System

BC and SilverLeaf enable 710 Labs and Post Investment Group to support future expansion goals. “The system provides a footprint to build upon,” says Jolley. As 710 Labs expands and Post Investment Group invests both actively and passively in more real estate, real estate services, health and wellness, and consumer products businesses, they have a strong foundation for growth.

The team wants to make enhancements to reporting and systems development, while continuing to use Power Automate and Power BI. “We’ve utilized Power Automate to onboard customers and vendors, as well as flows for strain creation so that we can recreate the process across our companies,” says Jolley. 710 Labs/Post is also using a Power Automate flow to onboard new users in Azure portal. “I’m personally using the AI recognition tool in Power Automate to scrape my emails and tell me what the tone is, provide a summary, and automatically move attachments to a
folder,” says Jolley.

Moving forward, 710 Labs will use Azure Synapse Analytics to gain insights across its data warehouses, data lakes, operational databases, and big data analytics systems. They can then query both relational and nonrelational data and optimize the performance of all queries with intelligent workload management, workload isolation, and limitless concurrency.

“It has been a great experience working with Velosio,” says Jolley. “We were looking for a partner to help us succeed, and Velosio is committed to that goal as well,” concludes Jolley.