Discover How Tilray Is Achieving Growth (in More Ways Than One) with Acumatica and LANDFALL
It’s a well-known fact that 9 out of every 10 startups will fail, and one of the biggest ways that startup companies fail is by not growing fast enough.
Though Tilray has certainly grown quickly as a company, increasing their employee headcount from 250 to an expected 1,000 between 2017 and 2019, expanding sales into 13 countries on 5 continents, and opening 3 major production facilities as well as 6 additional business entities since their founding in 2013, they’re still strongly focused on growth.
This is because the Canada-based business aims to be the most trusted cannabis company in the world and, working with Acumatica and LANDFALL Solutions, Tilray is coming ever-closer to achieving that goal.
Learn how Tilray has achieved success —and what lessons startups can take away from Tilray’s experience— with these 5 startup tips from LANDFALL Solutions.
Startup Tip #1: Business Flexibility Is Critical, Which Means Your Software Needs to Be Flexible Too
As a relatively new business in a brand-new industry, Tilray faced the rare situation in which they and all their competitors were learning as they went. They knew the company that was able to learn fastest would be the company that was best positioned for long-term success, and they wanted to be that fast learner.
Since modern business learning typically comes from trying new tactics, pivoting as the market shifts, and maintaining agility at all times, the Tilray team knew they’d need a flexible ERP with a lightning-fast development timeline that could accommodate a starting business’s unpredictable emerging needs with ease.
That’s why Tilray chose Acumatica Cloud ERP.
Startup Tip #2: Finding a Partner Who Takes You Seriously Is Crucial for Turning Your Goals into Realities
Implemented 4 years ago by LANDFALL Solutions and supported by LANDFALL since then, Tilray’s Acumatica setup includes Acumatica Manufacturing Edition and Acumatica Financial Management, as well as a few eCommerce implementations.
However, as a dynamically growing business in a dynamically growing industry, Tilray knew that their initial Acumatica implementations would simply be the first of many software changes. To maintain their growth, the cannabis manufacturer knew that their success depended on flexibility and the ability to integrate additional software capabilities constantly. In fact, Tilray’s CIO, Cuba Flowers, made it clear that he wanted to release new capabilities every month.
In the long-standing, highly traditional occupation of ERP sales and support, many ERP partners would have chuckled at Tilray’s goals to make changes each month, but LANDFALL took Tilray seriously. They set to work helping Flowers and the entire Tilray IT team implement continuous improvement measures.
Thus far, LANDFALL has been involved in:
- A “teamed” approach, working directly with Tilray’s business analysts and programmers to enable them to participate directly in ongoing global module implementation
- Hours of instructional coaching on Acumatica Web Services, Customization, and Reporting
- A specific reporting implementation, built for full compliance with Health Canada requirements
- International financial accounting, manufacturing, and distribution functions
Startup Tip #3: Gaining In-Depth Data Insight Will Help You Pull Ahead and StayAhead
In addition to involvement with the projects mentioned above, LANDFALL Solutions also developed an extension for Acumatica called The Assistant Controller, providing Tilray with data warehouse capabilities to integrate third-party data in Acumatica Reporting. This not only granted Tilray the core components they needed for maintaining harvest identification and data attributes, it also kept Tilray’s finger on their data “pulse” by transforming Acumatica into a data hub that would help them respond to surprising market changes better, faster, and more confidently than their competitors.
And keeping close tabs on their data was critically important to Tilray’s success.
As Flowers put it in an interview with Acumatica:
“…Data is absolutely paramount. In this industry, we learn a lot as we go. This is not a super-established industry, so producing cannabis at scale is a fairly new thing to do. And all of our competitors are learning at a quick rate, so thedata is really, really key. We have to look at that data all the time to make our operation efficient, make sure our costs are kept down, and make sure our product is super high quality, because all we produce in Canada is medical grade and pharma grade.”
Startup Tip #4: Data Analytics Must Be Followed by Execution, Which Means Your Software Must Be Able to Seamlessly Move from Insight to Action
If you’re running a quickly growing startup, you already know how important your data is. As a startup, you’re likely selling a new product, possibly in a newly emerging industry. Like Tilray, your data serves the crucial task of helping you learn as you go.
But, of course, data analysis can only go so far because it’s only a single part of the total business puzzle.
As Tilray knew, and as you know, one of the most important skills a successful startup must have in order to become an industry leader is the ability to act quickly on the data at hand. LANDFALL was able to help Tilray in that area too.
Over the 4 years they’ve been working together, LANDFALL has supported Tilray with continued roll outs for new functionality and international operations, and Tilray has continued to expand at an incredible pace.
With the Cloud ERP, international financial management was an easily overcome obstacle because Acumatica offers robust international accounting capabilities to its users. As Flowers stated, “Our global business, with a fairly complicated multinational financial structure, is getting handled in Acumatica from consolidation, multiple ledgers, multiple currencies to the production and the manufacturing…”
No problem there.
The other obstacle, though, took a bit more work to overcome.
Startup Tip #5: Success in the Modern Business Landscape Requires Speed – Speed to Market, Speed of Operations, and Speed in Reacting to the Unexpected
As Flowers explained in an interview with Acumatica, because the U.S. cannabis industry is determined by state-run medical and recreational programs, each state calls for slightly different requirements from suppliers like Tilray. The lack of federal cannabis laws make expansion especially difficult in the States.
“…In the U.S, or even internationally, you can’t ship anything across a border anywhere. So, we have to recreate the supply chain from the ground up, recreate the manufacturing / distribution and sell all that product into a specific market. So, it’s almost like taking a business, ‘cookie-cuttering’ it into different markets, but tweaking it to be compliant with the regulations in that particular market. So, you’d see where a flexible ERP and one that moves quickly is really paramount, because we’re breaking new ground every day.”
As a player in a constantly shifting, ever-evolving industry, Tilray knew they’d need an ERP that could keep up with the breakneck speed required to stay abreast and ahead of the regulations in each new state that legalized cannabis.
Fortunately, Tilray chose their ERP and partner wisely.
Because the Tilray team chose the power of Acumatica ERP paired with ongoing, dedicated support from LANDFALL Solutions, the cannabis manufacturer is confident that they’ll be able to overcome any new challenges that are thrown their way, and that they’ll succeed in their goal to be the most trusted cannabis company in the world.