Is your jewelry company operating efficiently?

We're not saying anything new by telling you that, at PIRO, we're working to help jewelry companies operate as efficiently as possible. We can only help you by providing a tool if you are serious about making a change.

How can you achieve better efficiency? Typically, you need to look for points in the company that can be automated, and human work can be freed up and reallocated to where human contribution is really needed.

Let me give you some examples of where your jewelry business is wasting time:

• Manual entry of sales orders into the system (customer and order data)
• Manual price quote calculation for custom orders
• Manual inventory management, continuous updating of spreadsheets
• Double data entry: into the website, QuickBooks, or CRM system
• Manual tracking of job orders: running around in the jewelry workshop to find out the order statuses
• Sending emails and status updates manually to customers

Is your jewelry business guilty of any of these? This is not the full list of where companies waste time; I just grabbed the most common examples. Remember, time is your greatest asset! Why are you wasting it?

Your time is your greatest asset – and the numbers don’t lie

We've been planning to create an ROI calculator for our website for some time now, something that none of our competitors have done yet. Although finding the right tools for this calculator is still ongoing, we've brought some formulas that might help you understand your own company's operations.

To continue with the examples above, let's see how much you're losing by not relying on a jewelry ERP for the repetitive part of the work.

1. Manual entry of sales orders

Every time a sale is made, the data needs to be recorded: who the customer is, what they're purchasing, the delivery deadline, whether they've paid or will pay later, shipping and billing details, etc.

If you use a POS for this, then this part will already be saved automatically in digital form.

But if you also have a website that isn't integrated with the back-office system, then you're stuck with the old, manual method.

If you're tracking sales orders and writing invoices on paper, it's even worse because, eventually, you'll have to digitize the data for accounting purposes. You can't avoid this.

Let's say manually entering a sales order into a system (POS, CRM) takes an average of 10 minutes. Let's do the calculation with 30 sales orders per day.

 

That means someone spends 300 minutes on this every day. That's 6,300 minutes per month, which is 105 hours per month. Obviously, the hourly wage can vary greatly, but for the purposes of this blog post, I'll use an average hourly wage of $20.

 

The calculation result: $2,100 is the monthly labor cost you pay your employee for a task that PIRO could automate. For example, our Shopify plugin costs $100 per month.

2. Manual price quote calculation for custom orders

Custom jewelry is a very dynamic market. Customers love it because they get something unique for their money. But they also have expectations; for example, they see a piece of jewelry online and call you to ask how much it would cost to make something similar. What do you say on the phone? Or what do you say when they come to your shop?

Obviously, you don't want to make a big mistake with the estimation because you want a fair margin. This is where calculations come in. Ideally, there's an Excel formula prepared for such cases. You calculate the raw materials, labor, margin… well, it’s not an easy job to do.

It's hard to say how much time someone spends on estimating a custom order because it depends on the method. Is half an hour too much or too little? I don't know.

Let's say there are 50 custom orders per month. Calculating with 30 minutes, someone spends 25 hours on making estimates. Obviously, only a properly qualified person can do this, so let's set the hourly rate at $40. That means you're throwing $1,000 out the window every month by doing this manually.

If done in a well-configured ERP system, preparing a price quote can be reduced to 5 minutes or less. You can reduce your monthly cost of $1,000 to $250, quadrupling your efficiency, plus you can confidently delegate the task to anyone else because the system won't allow mistakes. Your margin will be protected against mistakes and errors no matter who puts together the quote.

3. Manual inventory management

Manual inventory management is detrimental to your company in several ways; not only do you waste time, but it won't be real-time, and we haven't even discussed human error as a factor. But let's just focus on the time loss for now.

A considerable amount of work is required to manually track inventory movements in a jewelry company. Did we order something from the vendor? Did we sell something? Do we need to deduct raw materials that we use for production?

But isn't that what the inventory manager is for?

That's the problem; in most companies, an inventory manager is a full-time position, whereas a jewelry ERP can automate at least 80% of this work. This fact also simplifies the ROI calculations. How much do you pay your inventory manager annually?

 

The median salary in the United States in 2024 for the jewelry segment is around $60,000.

 

80% of that is $48,000.

Wait, what? If your company could save just half of that, it would still be great, wouldn't it?

4. Double data entry: into the website, QuickBooks, or CRM system

The problem with double data entry isn't just that it burns money, but everyone hates doing it. How great would it be if, when we changed a product in our back-office tool, we didn't have to do the same thing on the website? The accountant is always nagging us to send them the data on time, too.

I could continue the list, but there's no point. Because we're talking about the same symptom: using multiple tools that aren't connected, we're forced to enter the same data multiple times.

Estimating how much time is wasted on this is difficult because every company has different situations. If your company spends just 2 hours a day on double data entry, including various departments, that's 42 hours per month, and at $20 per hour, that's $840 per month. However, this number could be much higher in a poorly optimized company with many disjoint software tools.

PIRO can integrate these systems and provide automatic data feeds to the most important third-party systems. For example, our Shopify plugin automatically updates style and stock info for $100 per month, and orders come in automatically. Our QuickBooks plugin does the same for transferring data from PIRO Fusion to QuickBooks for the same cost.

The return on investment for these plugins is unquestionable. Do you see it that way too?

5. Manual tracking of job orders

One of our new clients (welcome Staghead Designs aboard) articulated, "I want to know from my desk where the orders are." Why is this important to a company besides obvious convenience? You've probably already guessed it: because it saves time.

Do you also have to rush around the workshop when a customer asks about the status of their order and when it will be ready? Do you even know who's working on it at the moment? Do you have a dedicated person responsible for tracking orders?

Assure your production manager that with the introduction of PIRO, their job won't disappear; it will just be transformed to become more efficient.

The PIRO system is capable of managing job order workflows flexibly. It can empower jewelers to scan jobs and update job order information. What happens alongside this? The production manager can oversee and direct the entire process from their desk. About 40% of the production manager’s time will be freed up, which he/she can devote to other valuable activities.

What does this 40% mean annually? Obviously, we're talking about a managerial salary, so let's conservatively calculate with an $80k salary. That's $32,000 in savings, and with this amount, you can upgrade your equipment and perhaps buy a new 3D printer to print more efficiently. Oops, but this is already layered efficiency growth! Does the investment in jewelry software pay off twice over?

6. Sending emails and status updates manually to customers

This falls more into the realm of customer support. Everyone agrees that transparent communication with customers is very important. Sometimes, a personal touch is needed, but routine communication could be easily automated.

Try to list which emails or calls could be automated in your company, and be surprised!

In PIRO, the following can be automated:

• Sending invoices, statement emails, order status emails, purchase order emails, price quote emails and few more

Most of these emails require just one click in PIRO system.

When writing manual emails, we often waste time gathering information from multiple sources, attaching documents, etc. Yet, most of these emails can be templated. And since the ERP system has already automatically collected the data that needs to be forwarded, sending the email can happen within a fraction of the time it would have taken previously.

In some cases, there's no need for a person to press the button at all because, based on the job workflow, triggers can be set, such as when the design is ready or when the order is ready for shipping.

These are handled with simple auto-emails in PIRO. Moreover, if the customer portal is set up, customers can check their order status themselves, making any phone calls or emails unnecessary.

If we free up a minimum of 3 hours of custom support time per day with this, do you know how much it adds up to annually, assuming a $20 hourly rate? $15,120 (with an average of 21 days per month, which is 63 hours monthly total, and that is 756 hours a year).

Sounds too great to be true? Conduct an audit within your company and calculate or just estimate it. If even half of this amount comes out, it's already worth investing in a jewelry ERP system.

What’s your excuse for not starting to implement PIRO?

Let's clarify things. Implementing a jewelry management system is a time-consuming process. And no, I'm not talking about a POS system that you can implement in three weeks.

I'm talking about a system that integrates all the processes in your company, automates most of them, and integrates with your other essential business tools. That's the true value of our PIRO Fusion system - complete business automation, resulting in better efficiency.

You might say that we were just playing with numbers in this blog post. But even if only half of it came true, wouldn't it still be worth it? It's just mind-blowing how much money you are potentially wasting every day.

If the numbers still haven't convinced you, I have one more attempt: imagine if your competitors were already doing this. With a good jewelry management system, you'll either be ahead of them... or right on their tail.

If you're interested, we can start the consultation as soon as tomorrow: Free consultation