How 155 year old brand is redefining jewellery retail using technology

The Gems and Jewellery sector plays a significant role in the Indian economy, contributing around 7% to the country’s GDP and 15% to India’s total merchandise exports.

With a presence in 29 cities and 41 retail stores across India, Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri Limited (TBZ) is among India’s largest jewellery brand. The 155-year-old brand has adopted the digital path and Pooraan Jaiswal, CTO at Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri is actively digitising the key business processes.

“Jewellery business includes several thousands of unique designs. In fact, no two stores of TBZ will house the same exact designs,” says Jaiswal.

Buyers usually visit multiple stores and then decide which design to purchase. The company realized that it could improve sales by expanding the design palette. According to Jaiswal, technology has helped tremendously in this area.

E-catalogue was the company’s one of the first initiative for digital transformation, where designs from all the stores, as well as from the warehouse, were made available online

“All these 2-3 million designs are now available in the ERP system, which had to be synced with the e-catalogue. Whenever a customer inside our store asks for more designs, we showcase all the designs that are present in the showroom plus through the e-catalogue,” says Jaiswal.

Using AR/VR to offer more options to customers

Apart from that, the company has also started using AR and VR in the stores where customers can try jewellery which is not physically available.

“It is live in four stores, and we’re trying to expand and evaluate other features that can be added further,” says Jaiswal.

When the customer wants tailor-made jewellery, the retailer can actually show him how the final product will look like by leveraging AR/VR. It also helps the company to gain insights into which jewellery is being tried the most and which ones are sold the least.

RPA, Cloud and IoT

Moving to the cloud, Jaiswal wanted to shift those systems/processes that were taking too much workload, were heavily process-oriented, CPU-consuming systems or required high memory. The company uses a hybrid cloud solution that primarily hinges on Oracle Cloud.

“Since we were already using Oracle ERP, we found that after going to the cloud, our system performance has easily increased three times,” says Jaiswal.

The jewellery retailer is also embedding small IoT devices (similar to barcode/RFID tags) in high-value jewellery to understand whether they have been tried, how many times they’ve been tried, or sold or unsold.

“All of this is with anonymous data, of course, aligned to privacy and other regulatory requirements. This device is pretty small and cannot be easily visible to the naked eye. Earlier, people used to understand inventory movement by looking at it when it was transferred to the store, or how many times it was there in-store etc. but that data was not available on a real-time basis. With the entry of IoT, we are able to get that data real-time,” he adds.

Besides this, RPA has also found its way inside TBZ. The company uses it to automate a few processes that were earlier done manually. For example, keeping a tab on the ledger, or taking invoices from customers and vendors that the company is dealing with for verification purposes etc.

Courtesy: EconomicTimes