One of the most challenging aspects of the cannabis industry is managing seed-to-sale traceability - all producers must use package IDs to track their products from the production facility to the retailer. Each individual product has its own package ID, so fulfilling an order to transport from your warehouse to your retail customer requires attention to detail and double- or triple-checking that you’re sending the right products.
LeafLink is incentivized to promote traceability best practices because it not only keeps our customers in business, it provides data that powers one of our primary profit centers - Payment on Sell-Through. This is a way for retailers to pay vendors only after they’ve sold inventory and requires both parties to have fully integrated their seed-to-sale systems with LeafLink.
Our OKRs for this project were proxies for compliance - attaching transfer manifests to orders, and creating associations between products in our platform and package IDs in the seed-to-sale tracking system.
We learned a lot about this time-consuming process by visiting customers, conducting Zoom interviews, asking questions, and watching how they were trying to stay compliant. There were a lot of printed out invoices, highlighters, manually recorded package IDs, recounts, scanning, and often an entire large workspace dedicated to each individual order (to ensure products couldn’t migrate or get left behind). Customers often complained about how some employees made mistakes during the fulfillment process, causing manual adjustments in their seed-to-sale system, or even conflict with the retailer who received a botched order.
“Take the human error of having to write a number on a piece of paper – it’s potential for error. If we can just bring in some automation, bring in some tools, some technology, it would definitely streamline our order fulfillment process.”
One of the ways LeafLink decided to address this customer pain point was to help producers and vendors streamline and automate this order assembly process, leveraging our existing integration with the seed-to-sale provider and our inventory management tools. We did this in three phases with increasing automation, to ensure we were building an accurate system that our customers would value and trust.
We first encouraged customers to attach seed-to-sale transfer manifests to their orders and used the data to associate package IDs from the manifest with line items on the order. These associations are a requirement for Payment on Sell-Through (PoST) orders. We saw an increase in these revenue-driving PoST orders as a result of this work, and quickly followed up with a nudge towards an underused feature (creating a persistent link between the LeafLink product and package ID so all new products would be matched automatically).
Our next initiative aimed to address the compliance gap with increased automation - suggesting a seed-to-sale transfer manifest to attach to a relevant order instead of asking the user to do it manually. This built on the previous work and went further to reduce friction. Because there is still mistrust of automated systems in this industry, we scheduled interviews with several customers to validate the direction of our work.
“We don't currently attach our manifests in LeafLink. But you know, I'm starting to think maybe there's some benefits to it.”
Based on these interviews, I created a workflow that kept the user in control while still reducing the amount of time it takes to perform compliance tasks.
Following up with customers as part of research for future iterations, we learned that not only do they get value out of these improvements, we've managed to bring back churned customers partly on the basis of how we've made compliance easier for them.
“I really like the package linking, manifest linking, stuff like that has been awesome. I can't imagine how much money that's going to save us just because of return rejection fees.”
After launching the first two phases, we saw product mappings increase significantly. The third phase launched in October of last year, and based on customer anecdotes we expect even more traction toward our goals.
