Efficiency is essential in any cannabis cultivation facility. With so many daily tasks to complete, cultivators need to be highly organized and detail oriented at every stage to support consistent and high-quality yields. It would be impossible to commit everything to memory while developing a facility’s grow plans, and that’s where production planning tools come into play.
Production planning is an essential feature of cultivation software, acting as the brain of the operation. Optimization and consistency of process and plant production are only possible because production planning gives cultivators what they need to build a roadmap to success. Here’s how you can effectively use these tools to achieve ideal results in your facility.
What is production planning for cannabis cultivation facilities?
Production planning is an essential part of optimizing a facility, helping growers save time and money by ensuring that each grow stage is thoughtfully planned, sustainable, and executed efficiently. It involves providing cultivators with the right tools, steps, and processes they need to successfully run, manage, and grow their business. This includes tailoring everything your facility needs to hit production goals, from larger questions about growth and expansion to details about day-to-day facility operations and management.
4 ways production planning tools maximize grow operations
Your cultivation software and production planning tools are closely linked: The information collected by and stored in your cultivation software provides the building blocks necessary to develop strong, actionable, and realistic plans that strengthen your grow. Aside from saving cultivators time and money, production planning helps in four key ways:
#1: Production planning optimizes facility use in a smart way
Constantly rotating schedules, plant movement, and catering to each cultivar’s need creates windows of downtime between growth stages or whole harvests. One of the main goals of production planning is to avoid this downtime, ensuring that every square foot of the facility is not sitting idle. This can be practically applied in several ways, including managing equipment and scheduling in your facility, monitoring and logging activity in each area of your grow facility, or overseeing the use of a specific piece of equipment, like Agrify’s
#2: Production planning supports healthy growth
To scale your grow, you need a process that’s repeatable and built for anticipated growth and change. Production planning tools utilize real data insights from your cultivation software to drive your decision-making and plan your next steps.
For example, if your cultivation software shows that you sell 20% more OG Kush than other cultivars, it clearly indicates high demand and may be a sign that this is the natural first place to expand your grow operations. Furthermore, you’ll get the information you need to succeed at this expansion: Tracked fertilization needs, lighting requirements, and other consumables can help you calculate the investment you need for a successful and scalable production.
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#3: Production planning accounts individual cultivar needs
Each cultivar has unique requirements for lighting, watering, fertilization, humidity, temperature, and other grow environments that must be followed to maintain consistent yields. No single calculation can properly encapsulate these needs across the board: The needs vary greatly, and even the slightest change can negatively impact a harvest. Production planning tools develop timelines and costs by cultivar to ensure that all variables are accounted for while designing and development grow plans.
Notably, a main component of accommodating for each cultivar is space considerations, which ties directly into facility use optimization discussed earlier in this blog. illustrate this with an example: In this scenario, a facility is growing two cultivars, which we’ll call Cultivar A and Cultivar B. The two have identical environmental requirements and can be germinated next to one another in the same space, but Cultivar A’s germination stage is three days shorter than Cultivar B’s. Instead of part of the germination area going unused for half a week, the facility can germinate a different cultivar with the same optimal environmental conditions in the space left empty by Cultivar A. Production planning accounts for both the space requirements and the cultivar’s needs while scheduling.
#4: You can calculate future costs with production planning
Production planning tools assist with predicting future costs based on actual, historical spend. Utilizing this information by cultivar, your grow operation can budget more appropriately for electric and water bills, trim your spending when necessary, produce more accurate financials for quarterly planning, and prevent overbuying or underbuying consumables, such as fertilizer.
The right production planning tools include an OpEx calculator that helps you accurately estimate spend and plan with confidence. With this calculator, you enter your grow space, your grow plan, irrigation and fertilizer frequency, and similar points as tracked by your cultivation software. This information is then used to calculate how much you will need of each item in the future. This is repeatable by cultivar, further improving your estimates and future planning costs.
Agrify Insights brings state of the art production planning to your grow operations
Through Agrify Insights’ production planning tools, no area of your facility will go overlooked or unused, taking the pain out of a process that’s both prone to human error and has long been mapped out manually. Using our cultivation software, you can and real-time statistics to properly plan for current grow needs and calculate what you need for future success.
Insights doesn’t stop at production planning, either: our cutting-edge platform offers unique benefits key for next-level grow operations, including advanced access control operations, automated data collection, and advanced reporting features that verify that your grow “recipes” are ensuring the phytocannabinoid and terpene yields you want. Learn more about Agrify Insights and contact us to learn how to plan for the future of growth at your grow operation.
