How Green Dragon reduced time spent on manual tasks by 90% and doubled business growth with Flowhub

About Green Dragon

Green Dragon Cannabis Company is a premium recreational marijuana dispensary in Colorado that started out in the medicinal marijuana industry prior to legalization. The company operates 12 locations throughout Colorado, as well as two cultivation centers and two MIP facilities.

Green Dragon is known for delivering high quality cannabis products at the best prices for their consumers, offering a full selection of flower, concentrates, edibles, topicals, drinks, CBD products, tinctures, apparel, as well as smoking accessories. They also strive to provide a casual and inviting in-store experience that is welcoming to everyone.

Understanding the importance of continuing to give consumers variety, consistency and potency, Green Dragon also began making its own high quality in-house products, including flower from their own grow facility and Magnus, the highest quality distillate on the market. At the end of the day, Green Dragon’s main focus is putting love and care into each and every one of their products and they remain committed to working with top notch third party vendors to serve their loyal and growing customer base.

The Challenge

Alex Levine, co-CEO of Green Dragon, joined the company in 2015 and oversees the company’s cultivation and retail operations. Prior to bringing on Flowhub in 2016, Levine was using another industry solution that wasn’t living up to expectations.

“Our previous solution failed us in many ways. From the lack of Metrc integration, to poor user interface and the inability to handle our high volume of inventory management across locations, we were experiencing many issues that were holding us back from operating as efficiently and effectively as possible.”

Every time a POS goes down that equates to lost revenue, annoyed customers, frustrated staff and a taxed IT team, which would negatively impact the company’s bottom line in addition to disrupting the customer’s experience. To alleviate this potential issue, Levine brought Flowhub on as the store’s new point-of-sale (POS) and inventory management platform and hasn’t looked back since. Green Dragon has been leveraging Flowhub for over three years to manage POS, compliance reporting, and inventory management. They’ve also been able to build out a full CRM and customer loyalty program as well as custom digital menu boards by working with Flowhub’s open API platform, which easily integrates with ecosystem partners.

Another major challenge for a cannabis enterprise like Green Dragon is managing a vast and complex inventory while also maintaining compliance with the state’s track and trace system, Metrc.

The Green Dragon Byers location serves as the inventory nervous center for all 12 stores across the state. A typical shipment of product can include hundreds of different SKUs and batches that must be broken down into smaller units for disbursement to other locations. To make matters more complex, each individual package must have separate SKUs that are attached to a Metrc tag.

Prior to bringing on the Flowhub, Sam Gyongyosi, inventory manager at Green Dragon, spent 75 percent of his time on monotonous, manual work, including managing inventory on a desktop with massive spreadsheets, which did not meet the needs of a modern and expanding dispensary like Green Dragon. Inventory management is mobile — it requires a significant amount of moving around to redistribute, batch and label product. It became a real drain on his team’s energy and time to constantly move back and forth between the product and the computer. This manual process was also more error prone, creating additional work for the back-end team if there was a missed discrepancy or error in the product after it left the distribution center.

The Solution

For Levine, the modern interface, intuitive, customizable reporting, 365x7 customer support and continued product innovation has given him peace of mind over managing store operations and setting the company up for continued growth. The mobile Nug has allowed store staff to automate the ID verification process for faster customer check-ins, improved accuracy and better confidence in compliance, which should be at the heart of any POS system.

From day one, Flowhub has gone above and beyond to implement the proper checks and balances to ensure that Green Dragon stays compliant with local regulations and that inventory is accurate and up-to-date in the system for required Metrc reporting. Another key feature for Levine has been the customizable reporting capabilities that make it easy for him to report on business success.

For Gyongyosi, the Flowhub Stash appgives him and his team of four a mobile platform that allows him to transfer product to stores, which can be anywhere from 10 to over 100 boxes at a time as well auditing inventory in real-time to quality track products, catch errors quickly and create a seamless process that “flows.”

Green Dragon typically receives product in two places: a digital record of it in Metrc, as well the physical product in the Byers distribution center. With Flowhub, Gyongyosi no longer has to manually copy and paste product information from an excel spreadsheet into the Flowhub platform, process it, and then physically create orders, scan Metrc tags and record the SKUs twice -- once in Metrc and once in Flowhub.

Instead, he’s able to use the transfer feature of the Stash App, leveraging the mobile Nug to streamline the entire inventory transfer process between stores in just a few clicks.

“What would have taken me 45-60 minutes, now takes 5 minutes with the Flowhub Stash App, which is insane! It made it so we can spend our time on other aspects of our inventory, whether it be looking at non-regulated products and where we’re going to send them or testing new products so we’re keeping our store inventory fresh and diverse.”

Flowhub has not only saved Sam time and resources on the back end, but it has also helped the front-end team deliver a quick and painless customer experience with the point-of-sale feature. With Flowhub, Green Dragon can continue to focus on what matters most: growing its business and delivering high quality products to cannabis consumers across Colorado.