Mastering Cannabis Operations: Personnel, Planning, and Production

Many growing cannabis producers have solved the challenge of using manual spreadsheets and entry-level accounting programs by transitioning to SilverLeaf CBC from Velosio as their ERP system. SilverLeaf is powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and integrates all financial and production functions to optimize cannabis business operations.

In Part 2 of our Mastering Cannabis Operations webinar series, Personnel, Planning and Production, Sara Silver and Jennifer Phoenix, our experts in ERP systems for the cannabis industry, take you through a the foundation of SilverLeaf. They also show you how to use the software to plan production, transact purchase and production orders, and trace your items during quality control and compliance testing.

Here are some of the highlights from the demo given during the webinar presentation:

Item Setup

When first implementing SilverLeaf, you can create each of the items you purchase and/or sell and enter information such as the retail price, vendor cost, the item quantity in each package, and units of measure. You can also identify whether you manufacture the item or source it from a vendor.

Other item information includes the bill of materials (BOM) to make the item and the routing—the steps of the process in which the BOM is assembled to make the item and the amount of time to complete the assembly. Each BOM can be expanded to show BOM items that have their own BOM components.

Item drill-downs will show the roll-up costs of raw materials, labor, and overhead, and those costs can be linked to the general ledger to track the total rollup costs for your entire inventory. Each item can be also linked to the work centers required to put the item components together. You can see the capacity of each work center to put item components together or to manufacture—which is based on hours of operation and resource availability (labor and machines).

Planning

The Work Center Load view in SilverLeaf shows the capacity (by month, week or day) of each work center. This is based on the time it takes to produce items, the hours the work center is available, and the availability of resources—machines and people.

There’s also a Demand Forecast, which is based on sales orders already in the system and predicted customer demand. This can be compared to inventory on hand as well as purchase orders and production orders to determine if there will be an item shortage. The system will alert you if time is running out to replenish items.

Transactions

The view of purchase orders in SilverLeaf lets you see the expected arrival date of components and the projected inventory once a BOM is assembled. You can also see the cost per item, and once a purchase order is received, the system enters the BOM component into a production order for assembly.

Production orders show what’s needed for each item including tag numbers, required work center time, and packaging. As with purchase orders, you can see projected inventory once the item is manufactured.

Item Tracing

SilverLeaf creates tags to identify THC, food and other products by batch. These tags can be scanned to check available inventory, perform movements, create picks or destroy product.  The integration between SilverLeaf tags and Metrc eliminates the need for duplicate data entry and helps prevent input errors. You can also sync data in Metrc with SilverLeaf when first deploying the solution.

The tags are particularly helpful if there’s a problem with item quality after it’s sold or if there’s a recall.  You can trace tags to identify the details of a customer purchase, document issues, and find out what the components were. From there, you can check the testing results and where the BOM items came from. This will help you determine the cause of the problem and identify other items that share the same components or came from the same lot.

Learn More

To learn more, check out the full on-demand webinar presentation given by Sara and Jennifer.

And for more information on SilverLeaf, visit www.silverleafcbc.com to connect with us today.