Have you ever met the problem where you couldn’t tell what raw materials or products you have in your inventory? Ever been in the situation whereby the time you collected all these information, they would be outdated because in the meantime other inventory movements would occur? Is it difficult to calculate the total value of your actual inventory? Or is it difficult to calculate how much raw material you will be needing for the production of your jewelry orders?

You can see from the previous questions that tracking your jewelry inventory is a complex problem. This gets particularly high importance in the jewelry industry because we’re talking about high-value items and materials. Whatever type of business may it be – manufacturer, retailer, wholesaler -, tracking your inventory is crucial.

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.

"I just don't get it"

While two decades ago an ERP system was mainly available for bigger enterprises, but today an increasing number of smaller companies are using ERPs. In fact, there is a wide variety of viable options for different industries: for manufacturing, for distribution, for food and beverages, etc., so ERP is just an umbrella term.

Despite the expansion of ERP systems in many different industries, the jewelry industry had a much narrower choice of selection in the recent past. It’s more than obvious for us that the jewelry industry is still looking to understand how a jewelry software can improve their business. As one of our MJSA Expo visitors said:

"I just don’t get it how a jewelry management software can help my business, and why we should invest money in such as system."