Hytiva’s Solution to Outages in the Cannabis Industry

By: Daniel Gozick/CTO Hytiva Technologies LLC

Cannabis dispensaries, much like any other retail business, rely heavily on technology to keep things running smoothly. From point-of-sale (POS) systems to inventory management, these tools are the backbone of daily operations. While operational, these systems and the software used do experience outages (downtime causing delay in the use of one or more systems). While these outages cannot be completely avoided, it has been found that if a vendor is using second and third parties within their software, they are 2-3 times more likely to have additional outages if they use the same security protocols.

Educating the Industry

At Hytiva, they understand the impact of third-party service failures often extends beyond the immediate loss of functionality. Many businesses don't realize that those same third-party services rely on other services themselves, expanding the web of dependencies and opening up more possibilities for an issue to arise somewhere along the chain. One of the services Hytiva Technologies offers is integration with other POS systems. Their experience integrating and monitoring other systems has revealed that all of the outages that occur, are coming from third party vendors. With call centers or AI messaging bots used to support vendor applications, this prevents clients from reaching knowledgeable support that can react quickly during an outage. Hytiva’s expertise is often called upon to provide technical support and help resolve other vendors problems.

Over the past 5 months statistics have shown the top POS vendors are averaging 3.4 outages per month. Some months there have been 5 or more incidents alone. These incidents range from ID Scan issues, Linking of Rewards Accounts and Tracking and Traceability.

Prime examples in the cannabis industry where Hytiva has to assist with support, are the well-known POS and state tracking outages that occur often, but cause the greatest damage every year on 4/20. Drastically affecting sales, this leaves many businesses and consumers helpless on the busiest day of the year with no timetable for recovery. Outages, whether big or small have consequences. These consequences of upset customers, lost sales and brand trust can heavily outweigh the cost of using systems specifically designed to reduce these occurrences.

Built for Reliability

With their vast technology background and experience, Hytiva Technologies continues to educate the industry and provide solutions to issues such as outages. Their solution: the Hytiva Point of Sale and Technology Suite of Services^®.

Joe Clarke, Chief Operating Officer says:

"Hytiva has specifically designed its cannabis suite of services to include all key business requirements for daily operations, tailored to each dispensary’s needs to minimize outages and maximize revenue potential.”

Hytiva’s Point of Sale combines the functionality of multiple vital services into one system, authored by one vendor. They’ve separated themselves from others by:

• Minimizing the number of third party services it uses.
• Covering all of the important services for daily operations, removing at least 3-5 third party dependencies that most other vendors require.
• There is no third party to consult with, due to their in-house technology team allowing them to work directly with customers. This allows them to quickly and efficiently, diagnose and resolve an issue when it arises.
• Hytiva does not rely on any third party for handling vital functionality or tasks, keeping its customers operational when others are not.

Growth with Hytiva

While third-party services offer undeniable benefits, they also introduce vulnerabilities that can lead to significant disruptions. Hytiva’s POS and Technology Suite of Services^® are uniquely designed to streamline operations, drastically improving the stability of your business, increasing revenue and quality of service while, reducing costs.