When your company starts collaborating with larger jewelry retail chains, they will probably ask if your ERP supports EDI. But what is EDI, and why could it be critical?

Simply put, EDI is a communication technology that transmits data from one system to another. 

Let’s be honest, most of us thought and hoped that the pandemic would come to an end in 2021 and the jewelry industry would come back to its pre-pandemic state. We proved to be too optimistic, many jewelry shops reported temporary closures during the past year as more and more businesses were migrating to online sales.

In the last few decades, the competition between jewelry casting companies has intensified. The more inventive ones have purchased the latest technologies, the best machinery and the latest 3D printers. But are these the only things that differentiate a reputable casting company from the others?

The question I will try to answer in this post is: how long does it take for software investments, and in particular investments into business software, to pay themselves back? And how will this payback happen and how do we know whether an investment in an ERP software system was or will be the right thing to do?

Budget overruns used to be the most common issues during the software projects.

Research data shows that in 2017 over 65% percent of companies exceeded their implementation budget. This percentage was even higher in the previous year at 74%, so while it is an improvement, it is still staggering.

From the moment when we stop managing our jewelry store on paper and start using a jewelry mangament and inventory software, the question of integrating it with third-party systems becomes unavoidable in order to move data back and forth between those systems and ours.

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 Ever been in the situation whereby the time you collected all these information, they would be outdated because in the meantime other inventory movements would occur?

The jewelry retail market is huge, it's worth about 200 billion dollars globally. Consequently, there is also a reasonably developed market for jewelry POS systems. Below you can find the main differences between the countless retail software.

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.

Jewelry ERPs are part of a category of software products called Enterprise Resource Planning. 
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.