Darakjian Jewelers. ERP implementation story

Summary

Darakjian Jewelers is a family owned retail jewelry store located in Southfield Michigan, United States. They have served their clients for around 45 years. While some firms use “service oriented” as a buzzword, Darakjian Jewelers is committed to providing their clients with the best experience and selection through the implementation of best practices and technology. Darakjian implemented HansaWorld’s fully integrated front and back office Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and is currently busy with deploying the HansaWorld Webshop together with repairs functionality. The result: significant reduction of man hours due to processes being automated and therefore being able to concentrate on giving their client the best possible service and selection.

Key Challenges

• Reduce duplication of data.
• Automate processes previously requiring lot of man hours.
• Get the software to support the company’s mission to give its clients the best quality of service by implementing Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Project Objectives

• Replace BusinessMind to get faster and more accurate reporting and information.
• Get all the users to use HansaWorld Enterprise for all their day-to-day activities, including time management and communication.

Solution and Services

Enterprise by HansaWorld (Accounts, Stock, Purchase and Sales Orders, CRM, Calendar, E-mail, Production, Service Orders, Web shop, Business Alerts).

HansaWorld and Elite Software Consultants consulting services.

Why Enterprise by HansaWorld

• Full and true integration
• Possibility to scale with the growth of their business
• Best solution to track serialized items
• Customizable to fit jewelry industry
• Lower cost of ownership than with other similar products Implementation Highlights
• Implementation completed just before the busy season in a short period of time
• Achieved the project objectives

DARAKJIAN JEWELERS

Darakjian Jewelers has some 45 years in jewelry retail, currently employing 20 people in one location. Darakjian gets extremely positive feedback from their clients, because they are so client-focused and always try to deliver the best possible experience, whether the customer walks in the door or buys on the internet.

Before deciding to buy Enterprise, they used BusinessMind, which is one of the most common software used amongst jewelry stores in United States. One of the main reasons they wanted to replace their previous system was that it did not have an integrated accounting component (General Ledger, Purchase Ledger and Sales Ledger). “There was lots of data duplication going on,” comments Darakjian. “Most of the software packages available on the market are not backed up by a substantial company, so you have issues with consistent product development, upgrading and maintenance.”

Darakjian decided that a significant step up in their investment in technology would generate a return, without worrying too much about the high level of that investment. In particular they understood that the higher level of initial investment than other competitors would score over time, as other solutions require the user continually to add new functionality in an attempt to keep up.

The choice of buying Enterprise was an easy one. They looked at many different ERP products, some less and some more expensive than Enterprise. Many of the products that had most of the features and functionality that HansaWorld has were actually more money, like Oracle and SAP. The ones that worked were equal to the price but did not have as much functionality. As Enterprise has been accredited by The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales, and in addition has received the prestigious Accountancy Age award two years in a row in 2006 and 2007, this gave Darakjian even more assurance that they were making the right choice deciding to run their business on HansaWorld.

“Enterprise is fundamentally different from the other software packages available to the industry by virtue of its depth and scope of functionality. It comprises some 45 modules to handle many different aspects of the business or enterprise. It is a completely integrated software solution so the user experiences the efficiency of an integrated system as well as the benefits of reporting and control through integration. By virtue of the fact that the system is completely integrated from the front to the back office including the general ledger, accounts receivable and accounts payable the efficiency allows you to focus on running your business and not on getting the system to function correctly,” says Darakjian

All valuable information available in one single system

Implementation of Enterprise started in July 2007 and they went live in November 2007.

The main reason they wanted to use Enterprise and the reason they like all the different modules that come with HansaWorld was the ability to get rid of the third party software that they were using (Address Book, iCal etc.), where information was sitting in the different corners of the company that you couldn’t necessarily know about. HansaWorld provided us the opportunity to get all this information into one database that would then allow us to do analysis and know what our people are doing as well as know what’s going on with our clients and our inventory.

“Another reason why we bought Enterprise was that it has fully-integrated CRM functionality. Before we had to do a lot of manual tracking, use a lot of Excel worksheets and spreadsheets, a lot of filling up papers and there was a lot of man hours and data entry, which I did not consider valuable. We wanted to find the solution towards getting rid of the man hours put into generating the results in the reports and get the reports in a more automated fashion. Also we wanted to remove the managers’ time and effort put into actually generating Excel spreadsheets,” says Darakjian. He continues

“We now keep all our appointments in HansaWorld’s Calendar module. We can see all the different types of activities that are done within the week. We know how many calls employees made, how many contacts we received, how many appointments we had and so on.”

HansaWorld’s Calendar is a team-based system, rather than personal - you can review other people’s diaries, and if necessary look at more than one diary at a time to see when several people are available. Entries can be made for planned time and compared to actual time spent, which makes employee’s effectiveness easier to monitor.

Darakjian has just finished implementing activity consequences, which is part of HansaWorld Enterprise ERP CRM workflow functionality. Darakjian uses HansaWorld’s workflow functionality to make them proactive with their customer service and get the system to create follow up activities for sending clients thank-you notes after sale. Also the system automatically notifies salespeople to make follow-up phone calls to find out about the client’s experience of their products and service levels. “With the help of HansaWorld’s Task Manager and Calendar we can really plan our time better. It helps us to monitor each other’s tasks, delegate and prioritize our daily workload. These are the kind of things we were really looking forward to using within HansaWorld and we really got excited about it,” says Darakjian.

Best solution for tracking serial numbered items

In many systems sold to the jewelry industry, one is given a choice between using a SKU- (Stock Keeping Unit) based system, which does not allow you to serialise items, or a serialized system where the serial number doesn’t necessarily fall within a stock number.

“What HansaWorld provided us, what we consider the best solution to the problem, and what I call a ‘nested serialization’ is where the system allows you to have one stock keeping unit number, one stock number and below that within that item number as many serial numbers as you would like. This way the reporting is very consistent. It allows you to analyze the stock number or the item itself without having to run the reports just on serial and also the serial numbers allow us to track items individually down to the client,” says Darakjian

Plan, plan, plan

“After implementing the software and conducting the appropriate training, it will take approximately 6 months for the system to grow “roots” in your organization. From this point forward you will save time, start to see more about what is going on in your business from a numbers perspective, not from a perceptual perspective,” says Darakjian.

He concludes “The better you plan your project the more successful it will be and most importantly make sure you have the right people available on your side, who understand the depth and the scope of the project.

For any system implementation to be successful the company needs the users to “love” and use the system. You achieve this by building trust in the system from the first day the system is being deployed. You have to keep building the trust within the system by making sure that every step along the way of the implementation process is something that is successful and something that people feel was truly accomplished.”

Darakjian’s next step with HansaWorld is to completely deploy all the modules. Their goal is to get HansaWorld more and more integrated within the company itself and to build more reliance on HansaWorld.