CHRONOLOGICAL HISTORY OF
Jewellers Computer Systems (JCS) / Advanced Retail Management Systems (ARMS)
1980 After attending New England University course on Business Management of a Jewellery Store at the Waikato University in Hamilton N.Z to learn more about managing his retail jewellery store, designed a manual inventory management system which was unique. This system operated on the principal of dividing stock into 40 departments with each item of stock having a stock number recorded on a cardboard strip along with the stock description, supplier code, supplier design number, date in, quantity on hand, cost price and retail price. The stock number comprised of six digits, the first two being the dept number (01-40) and the following four digits being the running number within that dept (0001-9999) Eg the tenth item in dept 19 was 190010. As an item was sold the cardboard strip was removed from the stock book and entered into the sales book, in dept order so that at the end of each month both the cost price and the selling prices on strips in each dept in the sales book were added up and the profit generated in each dept was available for analysis. The drawback in the system was the time it took to operate.
1981 In a quest to find a computerized inventory system to overcome the time handicap of the manual system Malcolm attended another course on Business Management of a Jewellery Store at the Waikato University in Hamilton N.Z. to find out what computer systems were available in the Jewellery Industry in Australia. The professors from Australia had no experience in computerized management systems and were unable to help. So Malcolm started designing computerised inventory system specifications by way of drawing report layouts on graph paper and documenting the calculation required for each field of each report. This continued for approx 12 months.
1982 Malcolm engaged a computer programmer who could understand what he was wanting to achieve to write a software program called Gemstock. Gemstock was created to track stock purchases, sales and profitability. GEMSTOCK which was written in SORD Basic language to the specification supplied by Malcolm. Malcolm spent many hours designing additional reports sitting beside the programmer as he wrote the program, explaining the specifications and giving him further direction on requirements of the Jewellery Industry. Malcolm along with four other jewellers installed a program called GEMSTOCK into their stores.
1983 In April 1983 Malcolm wrote a program on a SORD Pips database to track the cash flow of a retail business. This was called CAB (Cash Analysis Budgeting) and was used in conjunction with Gemstock to assist in managing a jewellery store. Computer programmer was contracted to write a new program known as SUPERGEM (SG). Jewellers Computer Systems Ltd. (JCS) started business. JCS started making sales to other jewellers in NZ and the software continued to be developed by JSC. JCS was operated out of Malcolm retail jewellery store with Software support and administration provided by Malcolm and his wife Margaret respectively. Later in 1983 JCS installed their first three Supergem systems in Australia, thus a market was established in Australia.
1990 Due to the very strong management content of the system the company name was changed from Jewellers Computer Systems (JCS) to Advanced Retail Management Systems Ltd. (now known globally as ARMS) to reflect that we provide far more than software.
1992 Malcolm visited North America to conduct market Research where he met with a number of independent jewelers through Bill Roberts at IJO, Canadian Jewellers Association and Bill Boyajian, then President of GIA. After meeting with Bill who was the Keynote Speaker at the Canadian Jewellers Conference in Banff and learning that he also had a strong desire to educate independent jewelers with business management skills a relationship was formed and GIA-ARMS was established to serve the North American Jewelry industry.
1993 Malcolm moved his Research & Development team to Vanuatu (one of the Pacific Islands) to develop new IP for a set of Windows programs known as both V6 and System 2000 now known as Signature Series.
1998 ARMS became independent of GIA and now operate from their offices in Henderson, Nevada.
