Inside a Metrc User Group Meeting

Dave and I regularly attend Metrc User Group meetings, most recently on Wednesday, November 8. Thought you might be interested in a brief rundown.

The meetings start with a roll call. It happens too quickly to write down all of the names, but I caught a few. As you might expect, the two largest contingents are from Franwell (the developer of Metrc) and the Colorado MED. Other companies represented include: Native Roots, The Green Solution, MJ Freeway, Flowhub, Craft Concentrates, Cannabis Business Alliance, and more.

The meetings have three parts: general updates, demo of enhancements since the last meeting, discussion of next enhancements to prioritize.

Updates

1. Rulemaking. Rules will be finalized over the next few weeks, leaving a short implementation window for Franwell. Very nice of the legislators to take their time getting the rules finalized, then stick the developers with an unrealistic deadline. Now they have to work overtime during the holidays. The under-appreciated developer in me says bullshit!
2. Reporting sales transactions. Metrc in Colorado is making a core change from daily sales uploads to item-level reporting. It’s apparently how things are already done in Oregon and Alaska, so this just brings Colorado in line. They are working on a communication plan and will give everyone six weeks notice.
3. API with transfers. A proposed staging area for third-party systems to fill out a manifest and send it to Metrc. The licensee logs in to edit or confirm, and once confirmed the manifest is active and displayed on the outgoing tab. Available in app and API. For bigger context, this is something Jordan helped push. Transfers is one area where businesses can make a lot of mistakes (ie, non-compliance) and Metrc doesn’t do anything to protect against them.

Demo of Enhancements

1. State supplemental (sounded like an addition to the Metrc user guide), changes to adjustment reasons
2. More detailed permissions for employees across the platform (plant inventory, etc.)
3. Changes to how you are recording plant waste
4. CSV upload now contains “notes” field

Next Enhancements

Franwell prioritizes user-requested enhancements in a somewhat odd manner. They have their development team do a rough, time-based estimate of the effort for each, share the list with the people in attendance, and have them rank the enhancements based on a budget of days. In this meeting, there were 13 enhancements with estimates that ranged from 5 to 45 days and totaled 275 days. We were given a budget of just 60 days.

We broke up into groups and discussed the priorities. Since we do not use the system as marijuana businesses do, Dave and I sat with a group of retailers as observers. At the end, a moderator recorded the rankings from each group and shared the results. Items 5 (15 days) and 13 (45 days) were the winners. Both are now expected to roll out in the February 1, 2018 release. For the full list of the proposed enhancements, click here.

So what’s odd about this process?

1. The estimates seem grossly long. Granted, I’m not familiar with the inner workings of Metrc, but 25 days of development to create a past due flag on a transfer manifest is crazy.
2. Why use a budget? It would be more effective to rank the enhancements rather than pick the couple that fit into an arbitrary budget.
3. The process is entirely dependent on who attends the meeting, which is not very representative of their users. I think a lot more people would be attending if they knew how Franwell was building its product roadmap.

Side-note: Group Learnings

Granted, we were with a small sample size of two business owners (one of whom, I believe Vivica was her name, has 20+ licenses), but a couple of interesting notes:

• These two based their decisions on Metrc’s new enhancements on how it would help them stay compliant (as opposed to save time, etc.). Again, this is a small sample, and perhaps not the most reliable one, as the hands-on people at the Metrc User Group probably aren’t the typical user.
• As retail stores, they didn’t see value in the staging area for transfers (that was pushed through by the MiPs and Cultivators). It was hard to follow some of our group’s rationale, but I’d guess it’s based on the fact that they aren’t doing a lot of outbound transfers.

Overall, it’s useful for Dave and I to attend these meetings. It’s enlightening to hear what Metrc users are saying, good and bad. It’s good for us to know how Franwell and the MED are reacting. And you never know who you might run into!