What is good to know about jewelry management systems

Implementing a jewelry software (or any other ERP) is a huge undertaking and inevitably comes with a certain degree of risk. For example, a recent study from an independent ERP consulting organization, Panorama Consulting, revealed that 28% of organizations reported their ERP implementation as a complete failure, resulting in an abandoned product.

This is somewhat surprising, as for most companies the risks are manageable if they are known ahead of time. Identifying problems that may arise and addressing them early will certainly help mitigate them before they become a point of failure for your project.

Some decades ago, in the sixties, just around the time when computers were about to be introduced in commercial service, people realized that these machines were pretty good for keeping track of inventories and estimating materials needs for manufacturing. This gave birth to the idea of Materials Requirements Planning – a collection of tools and methods for planning and managing materials for production.

Smaller jewelry businesses usually use different manual tools for tracking their processes: excel sheets, Google sheets, various documents, sometimes even pen and paper. As long as there is not a large amount of data that needs to be copied across these sheets and kept updated, this is fine and is (for the most part) convenient and cost-effective.

The problem arises when there are many people involved in the process or the complexity of the process increases.

Our CEO, Zsolt Torok has started a video blog – called Next Level Jewelry – in which he will be talking about topics that can help jewelry business owners to get familiar with technology solutions for their business.

In this very first video blog he is talking about why small jewelry businesses should invest in technology and automate repetitive tasks.

Tradeshows and other live events are great for B2B activities. However, due to the nature of our business we've found a better way of building relationships with our customers. PIRO Summit - organized for the first time in March, 2018 - is a dedicated live B2B event where we dedicate our time to jewelry companies looking for different IT solutions. Let me introduce PIRO Summit to all blog readers.

The US has been historically leading in creating and adapting new technologies – the jewelry retail sector is not much different in this aspect. In the early 2000s, when the first jewelry point-of-sale (POS) systems were launched, technically-minded jewelry retail stores started to use these computerized POS systems instead of paper sheets to track their sales and inventory.

The IT segment has kept an eye on the growing demand for jewelry specific POS systems and today there is a fierce competition: retailers can choose from a dozens of systems.

But not all of them are scalable enough to keep up with the recent changes in the retail sector. In this article I would like to highlight some trends that I envision for the next few years. Whether you agree or not, share your thoughts with us in the comment section – I look forward to reading them and starting a conversation.

How can smaller jewelry retailers and manufacturers stand out from the crowd and grab market share on the branded jewelry market? The value of jewelry branding is increasingly important; the branded jewelry segment has doubled since 2003. It is expected to comprise 30 to 40 percent of the fine jewelry market by 2020 – there is certainly enough room for more jewelry brands. The next few years could mark a revolutionary age for jewelry brands.

Branding is not just for globally popular names like Tiffany & Co or Pandora. Well designed, stocking brands can result in a significant business boost even for newcomer brands. Would you like your jewelry line to be the next well-known jewelry brand?

Changes and new challenges in the jewelry industry

We just came back from the JCK show in Las Vegas. It was interesting to hear the opinions of other exhibitors regarding the future of this and other similar jewelry shows: many of them mentioned that the number of visitors is less and less each year. It is not surprising that several exhibitors started to question their presence on these shows.

What’s happening with the jewelry industry? – we asked each other.

One of the potential answers is the virtual space. Yes, the online space has an increasing influence on the jewelry industry.

Implementing a jewelry software (or any other ERP) is a huge undertaking and inevitably comes with a certain degree of risk.

A recent study from an independent ERP consulting organization, Panorama Consulting, revealed that 26% of the organizations reported their ERP implementation as a failure.

For most, the risks are manageable if they are known ahead of time. Identifying what problems may arise and addressing them early will certainly help mitigate them before they become a point of failure for your project.

Software implementation researches showed that price is amongst the top five deciding factors when companies choose an ERP software (it's the number 1 factor in the case of first time buyers and number 5 for second time buyers). That's completely understandable as companies are worried about the ROI.

But what the ROI means when implementing an advanced jewelry ERP software?