Buying Efficiencies From Real-Time, Cross-Functional Collaboration
A national luxury jeweler revolutionized its gemstone procurement process by empowering its global team of planners, buyers, and inventory managers with real-time visibility, real-time cross-functional collaboration and intelligent automation throughout the procurement journey.
Challenge
A national luxury jeweler sought to revolutionize its gemstone procurement process by empowering its global team of planners, buyers, and inventory managers with real-time visibility, real-time cross-functional collaboration, and intelligent automation throughout the procurement journey.
The company's leadership aimed to eliminate inefficiencies inherent in disjointed processes reliant on Excel spreadsheets, emails, memos, and even whiteboards. Their existing toolkit necessitated extensive manual entry and reconciliation, leading to increased back-office investment, slowed market responsiveness, and heightened stress among team members, particularly during market events. The lack of real-time inventory visibility, purchase history access, and insight into global buying activities resulted in purchasing inconsistencies, cost disparities, and imbalanced high-value inventory stocks.
Furthermore, the sluggish and inflexible buying process hindered the company's ability to adapt swiftly to the rapidly evolving demands of the fine jewelry market, posing a significant challenge to maintaining resilience and competitiveness.
Engagement
To address these challenges, the retailer engaged a boutique retail consulting firm to devise a unified business process orchestrating planning, buying and stone processing (stone inventory management and back office). To be successful, the new process would require a data-intensive tool providing real-time and offline visibility to plans, buys, cost history, inventory, and market prices, enabling seamless collaboration between planners, buyers, vendors and inventory managers around procurement activities, and implementing real-time integration with ERP systems for PO creation, budget and inventory management.
Not finding any platform / software that would provide such capabilities out of the box or even after heavy customization, GSynergy was engaged to design and build a highly engineered, custom software for the retailer.
GSynergy provided a highly experienced digital transformation consultant who translated the cross-functional needs of the business to a user experience design and a playable prototype to help the business users tangibly experience the future before investing in software development. This was accompanied with deep analysis of retailer’s technical systems, infrastructure and data-model to help architect the technical stack of the software solution that would be secure, scalable, extensible and maintainable.
GSynergy put together a deeply technical team to build a highly performant, offline-first, real-time progressive web app (PWA) using its own technology built using Google Cloud Platform and React JS. This tool was delivered within six months, including a seven-week intense cross-functional user acceptance testing, complete with SSO, state-of-the art disaster recovery and high-availability, real-time integration with SAP including the ability to create POs with a click of a button, highly formatted downloadable excel order forms for placing orders with and loading purchases from small vendors, and much more.
GSynergy’s project leadership continually engaged retailer’s leadership and user community through demos, sandbox environments, and candid feedback sessions to ensure the solution continues to fit the needs of the retailer, and to help the retailer manage change such that the users could be immediately productive after go-live.
Results
Using the very intuitive and highly automated stone buying tool (SBT), buyers and stone processors were able to save three to four hours every day.
SBT provided buyers with consolidated stone needs from various sources, OTB, budget, inventory, purchase history, and price lists updated in real-time across all their devices, and at desired levels of detail, to help them make informed buying decisions, and then action and communicate those decisions to vendors through easy-to-use Excel order forms created with a click of a button. Technologically challenged small vendors can now easily submit the purchases via those forms that validate, upload and summarize all submitted purchases with a click of a button. All purchase actions and impacted metrics percolate through SBT to other buyers across the globe in real-time. Planners have gained real time visibility to all goods, open and in process, and payment terms. Stone processors have gained visibility to all goods incoming with expected arrival, PO, invoice and certification information. All goods receipt actions in SAP seamlessly sync with SBT to close the entire loop from needs generation, purchasing, to on-order and finally on-hand.
Not only did the retailer achieve the desired gains in cross-functional visibility, efficiency, cost consistency, and alignment of inventories with needs, but now with complete traceability throughout the sourcing process, the retailer is ready to embark on data-driven analysis of vendors and sourcing to improve profitability and vendor relationships.
Retailer’s leadership and users were extremely pleased with the hands-on, white-glove service provided by GSynergy. In the words of retailer’s executive leadership, “We have never had a consulting team deliver a solution as rich as SBT so successfully, on schedule and under budget!”.
Digital transformation is a continual process. Newly adopted technology demonstrates what is possible and then creates appetite for additional gains in productivity, growth and resilience. After a few months of using SBT, and adapting to the transformed business process, the retailer reengaged GSynergy twice to enhance SBT to further its gains in efficiencies.