Herbelin customer testimonial

Inventory management, parts ordering, order tracking… At Herbelin, data is a well-established tradition. The famous watchmaking house, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, has always made data a central element of its business strategies, and has never stopped evolving to keep up with its main Swiss and American competitors. “We had the notebook, the pencil, file-based accounting and then our first ERP (Enterprise resource planning, editor’s note) some thirty years ago,” recalls Cédric Gomez Montiel, General Manager of Herbelin. That’s when we laid the foundations for our manufacturing orders and price calculations.
Since then, we’ve never stopped improving them. “.

And to say that things have changed is an understatement. Since its foundation, the French company has produced over 10 million watches and established itself as one of the world’s leading watchmakers. Its products, which the company designs and manufactures in the Jura region, are distributed in fifty countries worldwide.Data,” points out Cédric Gomez Montiel, “is involved at every stage.

Thus, the company uses its sales data – collected from Dynamics 365 Business Central – and market data right from the design stage of its new collections.We release hundreds of models every year,” continues the Managing Director. The data helps us predict what will and won’t work.
We then have a whole quotation phase.
Because the tool enables us to know precisely the cost price of the components of the future watch, we’re able to set the initial selling price upstream”. . Above all, data is used to manage the production chain. Herbelin makes exceptional, hand-crafted products. After the initial production run, which feeds the company’s vault, watches are produced by the drop, according to demand. “The timing is quite complex.
It generally takes six to seven months from order to delivery.
This data enables us to anticipate orders and limit the absence of our products in boutiques. “.

At the end of June, the company completed a major overhaul of its order management software. “We were already with Microsoft, but migrated to Dynamics 365 Business Central to overhaul our ERP.
At the same time, we worked on dashboards generated via Microsoft PowerBI as well as Power Apps, which enable our field sales staff to take orders and better manage inventory“. The application, which provides information to all the company’s business units, also tracks watches sent to the after-sales service department. This Power Apps radically changes the way sales people work in the field. “Until now, if a sales rep delivered a new watch to a jeweller and sold it the same day, it would take up to four or six months for the part to be back in the store, by the time the sales rep returned to see it.
We are now able to monitor stock levels in real time, which means we can be more reactive on the production side, and thus immediately increase sales. “.
This tool also enables sales staff to know in real time what stocks are available in the company’s vaults, and to adapt their offers accordingly.
The deployment of the project also involved the teams of DBE’ s partners – Dynamics Business Excellence and BS-Team, allies in the transformation projects and well acquainted with Herbelin’s business challenges.

We are culturally very loyal,” continues the General Manager. In the ten years we’ve been working together, Microsoft has always met our expectations, and it was obvious for us to continue with the company“.
Beyond PowerBI, Power Apps and Business Central, Herbelin uses the entire Microsoft suite, from its Office 365 office tools to telephony with Microsoft Teams.
“We’re a very exposed brand, often featured in the press,” continues Cédric Gomez Montiel. Being the target of a computer attack is a possibility.
Another argument in favor of Microsoft is the level of security offered by its tools, which we would be unable to reproduce in-house. “.

A few weeks ago, Herbelin reached a new milestone in its success story. For the first time, the company opened a 140 m² direct sales store in the heart of the highly sought-after Saint Germain des Prés district. A sales and exhibition venue, but also a huge data opportunity.Historically, we’ve relied on a network of partner jewelers to sell our products,” points out Cédric Gomez Monti. There’s always an intermediary between us and the direct customer.
The store allows us to really know who our consumer is.
This is something very valuable for our data analysis.” . The next step is to take advantage of Microsoft technologies to “connect directly” to the cash registers of jewelers selling Herbelin products, in order to better understand the consumer and further improve inventory management.These innovations save time, increase efficiency and reduce errors,” concludes Cédric Gomez Monti. These new processes should enable us to increase our sales by at least 15% and improve our net cash flow by optimizing inventories“.