Scaling Metrc with the needs of the industry
There’s been a lot of time, a lot of effort, [and] a lot of money over many years trying to harden the backend so that we can handle different things.
To give you some perspective, we have many integrators, but there’s one that I was just talking to yesterday, and that’s why it’s [at the] top of [my] mind that passes 100 or 1.5 million calls every single day, which means that you’re [part] of that […] connection into the system, passing information or pulling information out every single day, so you can’t just build a system, like a simple app, [that] handles something like that.
It’s very difficult once you start to scale something, especially once you get past a certain size because there are just not that many software programs out there. And the way something has to be built to handle that volume and 360,000 people plugging away at it every single day is very different from maybe a typical app or something you might use on a day-in and day-out basis.
Importance of a federal standard
If you have a standard that pulls kind of everything together and takes this noise and distills it into the standard that’s common across the states, then you get into a situation where everybody’s speaking the same language, everybody’s compliant in the same kind of way.
You really open the door to that kind of holy grail. At least, many states in the west are [addressing] interstate commerce, and even further beyond that, as you pay attention to what’s happening, being able to export from the United States into Europe will be massive for the industry [as well].
And the best way to do that is to create a standard. So, I would say that […] when you rely on those annoyances of compliance to be able to really grow your business [in] a way that you otherwise didn’t have the opportunity [to], then it feels a lot more desired than required.
Michael Johnson, CEO of Metrc
Areas Metrc can help others in that most don’t see
It takes less than four seconds to go through an entire process from [the] manual process of weighing a plant if you’re using the RFID-enabled, and if I have a room of a hundred plants, they’re just not all going to end up yielding the same amount.
For many growers, getting ten more grams per plant would be, could be the difference between bankruptcy and being widely successful. That level of visibility and that data exists. It’s there. It’s passively collected. It’s cheap. You already have the most expensive part with the inlay and the tag.
If you had a similar RFID tag that wasn’t a Metrc tag but had similar specifications, you would pay three times as much in the market. You have this amazing opportunity to get this information, to be very successful, and to be at the cutting edge of efficiency as it relates to your operation.
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