Client

A Thailand based, fast growing, Designer Jewelry Manufacturer and Wholesaler with exports all over the world.

Background

The Jewelry Manufacturer, being an export oriented business, utilizes information technology and internet in a major way to service its clients and seek new business opportunities. Being a specialist in high value jewelry, the impetus to sales is provided by skilled and creative jewelry designers on board, by churning out fresh, scintillating designs.

Challenges

The global market for jewelry exports is extremely competitive with replicas of popular jewelry popping up all over. How does one protect the efforts of large number of hours spent in painstakingly creating new designs? If you display the designs on a publicly accessible website, you cannot stop anyone from copying the designs. And if you don’t put the designs on the website, you need a big effort to send out the designs to your customers.

Further, there are new designs being produced by this manufacturer all the time. The gemstone sizes and colors, jewelry sizes, weights, metals, pricing, currency rate fluctuation – with so many defined parameters, moving the details from the databases maintained at the factory and offices to the website was considered to be a specialized task which can be done only by computer wizards. The process was lengthy, cumbersome and prone to errors due to multi-step manual interventions. There was a need to constantly reconcile records in different databases.

The Jewelry Manufacturer wanted a secure, complete solution, which can be implemented to reduce the phenomenal administrative efforts required to juggle with technology supporting the business.

Solution

SIL stepped in to undertake a comprehensive study of the existing IT infrastructure and process flows of the Jewelry Manufacturer. With the domain expertise of the Diamonds and Jewelry business processes combined with technological domain expertise, SIL identified the infrastructural and process changes required to streamline the data maintenance.

SIL then developed an effective and secure e-commerce website which can be easily updated by the staff of the Jewelry Manufacturer. The customers now have the convenience of viewing the jewelry designs by using multiple selection criteria of their choice and ordering the same on the internet through secure payment gateways.

The website can be accessed only if the user is authorized by the Jewelry Manufacturer. This means it’s a private, B2B and B2C website which enables secure communication channel between the manufacturer and its customers.

The work flow software utilities developed ensured that there is no need to replicate the database manually onto the website thereby eliminating the possibilities of errors. These useful utilities are based on the principles of Straight Through Processing - STP - which enables once created data to be utilized for any other purposes without the need for creating it again at any step in the process cycle.

SIL also provided ongoing comprehensive IT infrastructure management services to ensure optimal utilization of the computer and network set up.

Benefits

		The earlier method of sending the new designs by email was time consuming, prone to errors and involved considerable manual efforts. Now, the moment new designs are updated on the website, emails can be sent out to all registered clients at one go. This has drastically reduced the time-to-market for the jewelry manufacturer thereby increasing the turnover significantly.
		The new, e-commerce enabled website makes it easy for the clients to “self service” at the time convenient to them. Considering the time zone differences between Thailand where the manufacturer is based and the other countries from where clients buy, this has become a great round the clock service. The valuable time spent in supporting information needs of the clients is now spent in focusing on client needs and business development.
		Since the website is “authorization controlled”, there is much lesser worry of the painstakingly developed new designs getting copied and produced by other cheap jewelry providers. Thus there is a much better protection of the intellectual property rights of the manufacturer.
		Since the new designs can be updated on the website by the staff directly, there is no need to pay up for such services from any specialized service provider. There is also no need to have great technical expertise to update the website.
		The work flow software utilities based on STP principles enable the staff of the jewelry manufacturer to extract the required records from the manufacturing database and update the same on the website without the need to handle the individual records separately. This saves tremendous amount of time, efforts and hence money for completing this important task of taking the new designs to the customers. What’s more, it has eliminated the human errors, so engrained in the manual processes.
		SIL’s comprehensive IT infrastructure management service ensures that the IT set up performs optimally. And just in case, if there is any requirement to handle any unforeseen breakdowns, the support team of SIL ensures that the downtime is absolutely minimal thereby significantly reducing the loss of productive hours.