India, November 24, 2020.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Emerald Jewel Industry India Limited (Emerald Jewellery), one of  India's largest jewellery manufacturers, today unveiled the "Tej" mobile app, a first-of-its-kind Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled mobile application platform powering the B2B business of Emerald Jewellery in India. The app connects Emerald Jewellery with its ~200 dealers, enabling them to search through a growing catalogue of over 500,000 jewellery designs quickly and navigate the complex ordering process easily.

As a part of the multi-year engagement, Emerald Jewellery selected IBM iX, the business design arm of IBM Services, to design, build and deploy Tej, which runs on iOS and Android operating systems. Utilizing the IBM Garage Methodology and IBM Research Labs India, a team of IBM technology and mobile design experts developed the Visual Browse and Visual Search APIs which is hosted on IBM Public Cloud and secured with the IBM Security MaaS360 with Watson Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) platform.

The collaboration with IBM has enabled Emerald Jewellery to redesign the buying process for their dealers, from jewellery design selection to placing a purchase order, using a zero-touch engagement model. Tej App integrates with Visual Browse and Visual Search from IBM Research labs developed for enhanced cognitive search capabilities. IBM India Research Labs developed the vision APIs to help Emerald Jewellery dealers search for specific design elements more easily.

“Our business model is B2B sales where we sell to wholesalers, dealers and large retail chains. With an in-house design team of 170 manual and computer-aided designers based out of Bombay, Delhi, Kolkata and Coimbatore, we have built a design bank of more than 500,000 designs. We introduce more than 2000 new designs across categories every month. This is one of our greatest strengths and there is a need to showcase this to our customers and expand the design range for jewellery retail in India," said Mr. K Srinivasan, Managing Director, Emerald Jewel Industry India Limited.

He added, "Tej will help us showcase our designs seamlessly and allow our customers across the country to order the latest trends in jewellery design, at the click of a button. I am also happy to share that the Tej mobile app enabled us to reach out to our dealers in spite of the restrictions laid down by the COVID-19 lockdown."

Emerald Jewellery aspires to be the world's largest jewellery manufacturer. The company plans to bring on-board hundreds of new dealers, in the next one year, as they now have the capacity to scale resource requirements on-demand using IBM Cloud. Also, using Tej means that any authorized dealer can start doing business with Emerald Jewellery, using a smart tablet. This BYOD (bring your own device) model takes advantage of IBM Security MaaS360 UEM software to securely deploy the Tej mobile app on any device, whether it be a smartphone or a tablet. Before using UEM, dealers had to be issued with a pre-loaded tablet and updates to inventory and designs would take time.

Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India/South Asia, said, "We are proud to partner with Emerald Jewel Industry India Limited, one of India's largest jewellery manufacturers. As their strategic transformation partner, we were able to deliver to a challenging and complex requirement of a B2B ordering system. Each order having multiple configurations of jewellery designs in various caratage, size and weight, was a complex CPQ (Configure Price and Quote) system that was built for Emerald Jewellery on a hybrid mobile app architecture hosted on IBM Cloud.”

"We also ensured that the customer ordering process is directly integrated into their ERP system by developing consumable API's on their ERP platform and integrating it with the 'Tej' app. 'Tej' mobile app is a truly “born-on-the-cloud” solution, developed and hosted on IBM Cloud," reiterated Sandip Patel, Managing Director, IBM India/South Asia.

The initial success of Tej has been encouraging. The IBM iX team collaborated virtually with the Emerald Jewellery team using the IBM Garage Methodology to upgrade and fast-track the deployment of the Tej mobile app in April 2020 during the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, thanks to a support system operated by IBM and Emerald Jewellery team, customer and sales teams benefit from quicker response times to queries and other requests for assistance.