A Case Study in Cannabis Writing

Imagine running a legal cannabis business. Your workday starts by punching in an access code to enter a nondescript building in the middle of a warehouse district. From the outside, it looks no different from any other building in the area and you can’t even smell what’s on the other side of the walls. You’re instantly greeted by the sweet aroma of live cannabis plants. The security guard greets you as you see yourself, along with all the grow areas, on the closed-circuit TV in the reception area. There’s never a dull moment. The new batch needs to be tested for quality assurance, new clones need to be cut from the mother plants, teenage plants need to be moved from the propagation area to the flowering room, and all this information needs to be entered into the state tracking system. There are a lot of moving parts in a large cannabis enterprise and people need tools to help them manage and track all that information. Luckily, there are solutions to just that problem.

In January of this year (2019) I took a job as a product writer and trainer at a software company that provides business management software to the cannabis sector. This specific kind of software is known as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool. Before I took this position, I had never even heard of an ERP, but I quickly learned that there is this whole little world that revolves around helping businesses implement ERP systems. My company, 365 Cannabis, does just that.

Now that my head has stopped spinning from learning what an ERP is and how it works, it’s time to get down to the brass tacks of really documenting the system and what works to train other people on how to use it.

My goal with this blog for the foreseeable future is to document the cannabis ERP documentation process. Kind of meta right?