Case Study: Helping Rubicon Organics save half million in one year

Lire l'étude de cas en français ici

TL;DR - We helped Rubicon Organics significantly reduce the management time & cost of its cannabis quality assurance program. Here are the highlights:

$500,000+ saved on QA personnel alone in the first year of implementation
Batch release 600% faster than a paper-based quality assurance system
Streamlined visibility of the entire facility
Virtual audits made easy, thanks to a fully digital platform

"Thanks to Elevated Signals we have massively reduced the amount of time and cost needed to manage our Quality Assurance program"
Tyler Perkins, QAP, Rubicon Organics

You can download the case study here or read the full story below 👇

Credit: Rubicon Organics

The Situation

Rubicon Organics is a publicly traded licensed producer that cultivates organic certified cannabis in its state-of-the-art 125,000 sq. ft. hybrid greenhouse in Delta, BC. In addition to its flagship brand, Simply Bare™ Organic, the company develops cannabis products under 1964 Supply Co., Homestead Cannabis Supply, WildFlower and its concentrate brand LAB THEORY™.

For its quality program, Rubicon Organics had initially paired seed-to-sale software with a paper-based recordkeeping system for quality assurance. As the company started to expand, the team soon realized the cost and burden of manually managing a paper system were significantly outweighing the benefits. They needed a process that didn’t slow them down and could scale with them.

“The paper-based system required significant resources to manage,” said Tyler Perkins, QAP at Rubicon Organics, “and our production team was looking at hiring a QA compliance liaison for every department to move paper documents back and forth for verification,” a move that would have seen a significant increase operating costs.

Credit: Rubicon Organics

The Solution

The team considered a number of electronic systems to help with the growing demand but, as Tyler states, “their feature sets didn’t meet our requirements, it felt like fitting a square into a circle.” Rubicon Organics found the perfect fit with Elevated Signals, a SaaS platform that streamlines inventory management and quality recordkeeping into one system, enabling users to run a fully digital cannabis quality assurance program.

“There is no one like Elevated Signals in the market. Their team has built a truly unique offering with endless value to licence holders.”

Deploying the digital system was seamless; from the first day of implementation Rubicon Organics was able to digitize its recordkeeping and automate its quality processes.

The ability to build their own forms in Elevated Signals meant that the team could reduce errors and significantly speed up the batch release process.

The platform’s customizable capabilities also ensured Rubicon Organics met its Health Canada GxP obligations as well as the requirements for its organic certification.

“Implementing Elevated Signals has improved the efficiency of our QMS, and massively reduced the amount of time and personnel needed to manage our QA program,” said Tyler.

Soon after implementation, Rubicon Organics realized that Elevated Signals’ inventory function was far superior to that of the seed-to-sale system it had in place. The team now tracks both its inventory and quality assurance data in Elevated Signals. This centralization has given them streamlined visibility of their entire cannabis facility, while keeping operational and compliance costs low.

Credit: Rubicon Organics

The Success

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At Least Half a Million Dollars Saved in Quality Assurance Personnel Alone in the First Year: Before implementing Elevated Signals, RO was planning on hiring eight new QAs. The software meant the company didn’t need to do this, saving roughly $516,000 in the first year alone.

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Batch Release Time is 600% Faster: With a paper-based quality assurance system, it would typically take RO two weeks to release a batch. With Elevated Signals batches can be reviewed and released within a day of production. That’s roughly 288 hours of QA’s time saved!

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Virtual Audits Made Easy: Having an organized, digital, and automated system for submitting documentation rather than scanning necessary paperwork manually made virtual inspections far easier. “I couldn’t even imagine doing a virtual audit with a paper based system, Elevated Signals really helped with the whole process,” commented Tyler.

Credit: Rubicon Organics

"Not only do they [Elevated Signals] have the best software in the industry right now, they're always going to be the best because they are constantly making it better"
Tyler Perkins, QAP, Rubicon Organics

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