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About Client
Our client is an internationally renowned and one of the largest diamond and jewelry recycling trading companies in the world. Diamonds are removed from jewelry, aggregated, sorted, re-polished, and sold back to the industry for use in manufacturing new jewelry. We can draw inference about the level of transactions and business done by the company from the fact that it traded more than $100 million of recycled diamonds and jewelry in 2014 alone.It now provides a host of solutions to jewelry retailers, wholesalers and manufacturers right from buying and selling millions of dollars of surplus jewelry inventory to partnering with retailers to provide in-store buy back programs to their customers. The client approached us with the problem of having too much of paperwork and unable to handle their entire process of buying the jewelry, processing it and selling it efficiently. They wanted a proper all rounder system that would not only in tracking the workflow at each phase but also help in effective inventory and finance management. Keeping in mind the level of workflow and analytics involved we recommended building a Salesforce based solution to cater to their needs.
How We Did It?
- Complete Salesforce Implementation.
- Hardware Integration.
- Inventory Management.
- Integration with Financial Force.
- Web-Service Integration.
- Visualforce Sites.
Complete Salesforce Implementation.
Challenge: How to go paperless and enable cloud based workflow tracking?
The client being a trading firm dealing in millions of dollars of recycled diamonds and jewelry, required a lot of paperwork. They initially had the legacy system of storing and tracking data but it was a costly affair with a difficult user interface which was was not fruitful to the company. They had segregated their entire workflow in three phases i.e buying, processing and selling. It was the need of the hour to automate these phases.
Solution: A complete salesforce based solution to track all the phases of business deals.
We suggested a complete Salesforce based solution to the client and helped them move their entire data from their legacy database system to Salesforce. We performed exhaustive requirement gathering. And thereby designed and implemented complete workflows as per extensive research of client needs. We had also anticipated their future needs and created flexible workflows.We had automated each phase of buying, processing and selling using Salesforce and also provided role based authentication at each of these phases. Each step in every phase was thus automated and trackable. We had provided a complete solution along with hardware, financialforce and third party web-services integration to meet all their needs.
Hardware Integration.
Challenge: How to integrate hardware with Salesforce?
Right from buying to selling of diamonds and jewelry it involved a lot of data like weight of gold, diamond carats, size, cut, date of selling, etc. The challenge was to feed large and critical amount of data in the system while the sales representatives were on the go. So it was a very daunting task to collect and update data in the system in real time. They needed such a system which could scan their memos,bills and other relevant documents and feed the appropriate data in Salesforce at real time from anywhere across the globe.
Solution: Salesforce integration with scanner and printer.
We provided this unique solution of integrating the scanner and printer with the Salesforce Solution. This allowed the agents to scan the bills and enter all the related jewelry transaction document, and feed it into Salesforce. But the main challenge was authentication.Salesforce has a strong authentication process and it authenticates using the IP address. The scanner was viable to align with different IP addresses, hence it was an impossible task to authenticate it with the help of IP address as there was no static IP. So we took the help of PageKite solution which acted an as intermediate between Salesforce and the changing IP and every time a document is scanned Salesforce looks for authentication from it. And the data thus scanned is directly fed into the system irrespective of the location from where it has been scanned. It was also integrated with the RFID printer which had flexible operations and print data as and when required.
Inventory Management.
Challenge: Keeping a track of all the components of jewelry and their quantity at real time.
They had a process which involved buying of diamonds and jewelry, segregating the components and then reselling it again. They segregated the different components of the jewelry so there was a list of data to be maintained for each type of component extracted. So it was a pretty difficult task to update the stock of each and every component with all the minute details at real time.
Solution: A Salesforce based solution to calculate the the quantity of each item and update it accordingly.
We provided a complete cloud based solution which not only helped to maintain the data but also helped to keep a calculated track of all the components- their quantity, weight,etc and thereby helping in inventory management.At the buying phase they needed to keep a record of what was being bought, their quantity, and a lot more. Similarly at the processing phase they had to keep a proper record of what are the components extracted, their quantity,size,cut and other important aspects. And at the selling phase they needed to update their inventory accordingly to keep a check on the number of items sold and the ones remaining along with their relevant details.
Integration with Financial Force.
Challenge: How to do real time financial analysis?
They dealt with a lot of calculations at each phase. It was a tedious task to buy the jewelry and calculate the market value of the various components. Then formulate the prices of each component on that particular date and sell them. The entire process involved a lot of calculation and they needed a system which had an integrated component to do these calculations and generate reports automatically.
Solution: Complete Salesforce integration with FinancialForce.
In order to solve this problem we came up with the idea to integrate FinancialForce with Salesforce. FinancialForce is a cloud based simple yet powerful, accounting application.It includes sophisticated accounting components such as multi-currency, global tax and multi-company accounting capabilities across the entire system. It takes up the data from Salesforce and is built for real-time financial analysis and calculations. It can be used to scan data, feed it in the system and calculate the profit,loss or balance sheets all in no time.
Web-Service Integration.
Challenge: How to do Web-Service Integration?
Being one of the top diamond and jewelry recycling companies it had a very vital requirement of displaying its products on the desired jewelry based e-commerce websites. As new components were processed and segregated, they needed a system which would automatically update their display items in these third party websites along with their details at real time. For this they needed to push data from Salesforce to these third party web-services directly.
Solution: Salesforce integration with third party web-services.
We suggested Salesforce integration with the third party web-services. There was Rapnet, Blue Nile, Idex and Polygone which catered to their need of displaying their available components for sale. A few of them had Restful API and the data can be directly pushed from Salesforce to these third party web-services and can be displayed accordingly. But a few of them did not support direct pushing of data from Salesforce as they had the old FTP system.Hence we created a custom java adapter for them which can pull data from the Salesforce system and push it to FTP and then it could push the same data to these web-service portals via FTP protocol and display their product with their relevant details automatically when the inventory is updated in the system.
Visualforce Sites.
Challenge: To create an e-commerce portal for holding various events.
They wanted an e-commerce portal to display their products for the purpose of bidding. They wanted an easy to use portal which can pull relevant data directly from the system and display the appropriate items during the respective events.
Solution: A Visualforce based e-commerce site.
We created a Visualforce based e-commerce portal for the company to display their products for bidding. Visualforce gave the provision to create a user friendly portal which would pull as well as push data from Salesforce. At the same time we provided user based authentication to make the url visible only to the potential client so that they can bid on it. It had the provision of pulling the relevant data from the system and displaying it to the potential authenticated customers during the various events.
Results
Paperwork reduced by 75%
The sales representatives can directly scan memos and data is directly fed into the system. Needless to say it cuts off the paperwork tremendously.
Reachability increases by 28% .
Visualforce sites increases reachability and people are more up to date with the various ongoing and upcoming events.
Revenue generation increases by 35%.
Financial force enhanced real time financial analysis thereby increasing the revenue.
Time taken for Jewelry Recycle Process reduces by 40%.
Automated workflow reduces the entire jewelry recycle process.

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