With the changing times and herald of the era of digital technology, jewelers must update themselves to maintain an updated ledger, financial accounts, and other documentation. However, given the jewelry sector is highly fragmented and mostly dominated by unorganized players, most of the jewelers still resort to manual handling of documents and ledger leading to long term financial losses.
In such a scenario, the use of ERP software for jewelry business becomes a necessity rather than a luxury to ensure that the organization’s financial part is in order.
How is ERP Software Important in the Jewelry Industry?
There are several factors that outline the importance of ERP software in jewelry.
- Making predictions and setting prices
The jewelry market, especially for those dealing in gold, the cost of raw materials fluctuates to a great extent. Hence it becomes difficult to exactly account for the cost of raw materials used in making a product. A lot of the jewelers are then left in the lurch as to how to price the end product. Sometimes they overprice the product leading to loss of customers, while in some scenarios, they are forced to under-price their products, leading to fiscal loss.
To avoid problems, the jewelry industry should implement diamond ERP software to ensure that the exact cost of raw materials is known, and hence the product can be priced accordingly. This would minimize the loss and lead to enhanced customer acquisition while delivering a strategic edge over the competitors.
- Management of processes, workflows, and SOPs
In any jewelry business, a higher degree of customization is required to serve the customers. Hence even by enhancing customization by 1%, the price of the end product might change by a considerable margin.
Hence, most jewelers face the double whammy of lack of processes to approve and manufacture such customized products while lack of SOPs hinders their ability to develop new products and enhance their product portfolio. Hence ERP software for jewelry business can help the jewelry industry to design better workflows and come up with new customized products.
- Workforce and Skill Management
In the field of jewelry, the workforce provides the greatest strategic edge as the raw materials and technology are the same for almost all the participants. So, ERP helps the jewelry outlet to better utilize and deploy its workforce. This leads to increased qualitative work and also helps in the up skilling of the human resource.
- Demand Management
One of Achilles’ heels for the jewelry industry as a whole is the seasonality of the demand. Moreover, jewelry being a luxurious item, the demand for it varied greatly with the consumers’ purchasing power and disposable income. In fact, it would not be wrong to say that for high-end jewelry items, the demand is highly elastic and henceforth very difficult to predict.
In such a testifying situation, diamond ERP software can help the jewelry outlet or establishment analyze past consumer behavior and align its products and production apparatus accordingly. Hence ERP would help in predicting future demand more accurately, thus helping in designing products and investment plans. ERP could help tide over seasonality of demand by developing a long-term production and purchase plan.
- Retail Operations
In any business customer is the king, and to please the king, one must be very skilled at retail operations. ERP could help the jewelry industry have a deeper insight into consumer behavior and understand its customers’ pulse. This could be in the field of pricing, product management, service management, handling customers.
ERP, if aligned with CRM (Customer Relationship Management), could serve as a force multiplier and help acquire and serve more customers. In a similar vein, ERP could help the jewelry industry cross-sell other services by directly dealing with the DMU (Decision Making Unit) of the consumer’s family. This would lead to an increase in revenue and enhance customer acquisition.
Apart from the applications mentioned above, ERP software for jewelry business can be used extensively in the jewelry industry in purchase management, weeding out counterfeit products by ensuring the purity of the raw materials (especially in terms of gold jewelry), etc.
Conclusion
Hence, given the various ERP applications, the jewelry industry as a whole should embrace ERP holistically and comprehensively.