LAGUNA HILLS, CA – HENDRX has selected OptiPro Manufacturing Software, Inc. as the manufacturing software to meet compliance needs and manage their rapidly expanding business.
HENDRX Farms, located in Humboldt County, California, planted their first cannabis seed in 1996 after the historic passage of the California Compassionate Care Act. Since then they have grown into a lifetime of medicine and high-quality organic farmaceuticals, providing healthy, clean and valuable cannabis genetics to their associated farms.
In its early stages, the business was a cooperative with their customer farmers. When Proposition 64 came into effect in 2017 in California, with full legalization of cannabis in 2018, this allowed HENDRX Farms to fully incorporate. They brought their separate operations together into one warehouse and have been building from the ground up since then. Because they had pre-existed as a medical collective, they had priority licensing which put them at the front of the line and gave them a head start in what was essentially a new industry.
They were not ready for the influx of business. It was the middle of 2017, right at the height of the season, when they realized their current legacy system was completely insufficient to run the operation.
HENDRX Farms business is about cloning. They have a greenhouse setup in which they grow on what they call the ‘Mother’ plants, which are the different genetic lines. They take cuttings from the mother plants and bring them into a lab area where they can do a lot of high-density propagation. That lab is almost a pharmaceutical lab, pressurized, and with water-proof walls so they can spray down and keep it all hygienic. From cuttings, they also have a tissue culture partner that they work with who will take genetics for them so they can enter them into a clean stock program and then bring them back on site. They then do cloning off those mothers. So far, the industry hasn’t fully evolved to bringing in tissue culture to a large scale, so they hope to be able to parallel their business partner and expand into that realm in the next couple of years.
They were using a mixture of Excel, and hard-copy analog systems – just clipboards and manually recording everything, then entering that data into excel. They used QuickBooks really basically, just a patchwork of solutions.
The legislation changes were the trigger for needing a new business management system. When they opened their doors, they were one of the few that really put themselves out there with a strong advertising campaign. That was a double-edged sword. Their phones started ringing off the hook, but that put massive strains on their production line. They were not ready for the influx of business. It was the middle of 2017, right at the height of the season, when they realized their current legacy system was completely insufficient to run the operation.
They were using a mixture of Excel, and hard-copy analog systems – just clipboards and manually recording everything, then entering that data into excel. They used QuickBooks really basically, just a patchwork of solutions. Travis Poe, HENDRX Facility Director/Founder, said “This led us to start looking for a new solution and we had a business advisor who was a supply chain guy from Boeing. He came in to give us a hand and looked at our inefficiencies. The number one thing he said was, to get a system that will give you visibility. For everything else, the data will set you free. We really took that to heart, and started looking for the right solution.”
