GeNext @ the cutting edge

AHMEDABAD: Just a year into his father’s diamond business in Surat, Aagam Sanghvi is busy giving the trade a cutting edge. Miles away, in Mumbai, 22-year-old Bharat Kakadia, who joined the family’s diamond business barely a few months ago, is making powerpoint presentations on improving HR practices in Sheetal Diamond Manufacturing Co, which owns the Kiah brand.

The GeNext of the diamond industry is changing the rules of the game. They are charting their own course, a far cry from the way their parents ran the business — by ushering in cutting-edge technology. But why? What’s wrong with the status quo?

Sanghvi, 24, who returned home after arming himself with a degree from the New York Institute of Technology, believes that if the diamond industry does not adopt IT, the more smarter Chinese traders will soon polish them up. “We can’t do without IT, SAP, global best practices,” says Mr Kakadia, who graduated in business management with finance from New York in 2006.

From family-run entities, diamond businesses are slowly but steadily adopting a corporate culture. A recent study jointly conducted by Gems and Jewellery Export Promotion Council and KMPG warn that India’s share of diamond processing industry will drop from the current 57% to 49% by 2015. One of the recommendations the study makes is professionalising family businesses.

The scion of the Sanghvi family, which runs one of the country’s leading diamond firms, Sanghvi Exports, Aagam has initiated a number of processes.

“After observing the best practices worldover, we feel there’s lot to be done back home. Barring a few leading players in the industry, most small and middle-sized companies operate in a very traditional way. I used to discuss this with my father,” he says. And, he’s not limiting himself to his own business.

Currently, he is busy chalking out details for a two-day conference being organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) on use of information technology in the gems and jewellery sector to boost their production and output.

The event will have leading IT companies interacting with over 250 diamond merchants in Surat on issues ranging from servers, networking, actual data security, access control to online trading. “Right from manufacturing to HR, marketing to finance, IT is going to drive everything in the business,” says Mr Sanghvi.

“We introduced a series of changes, including formalising HR process. It has always been much more professional than most companies, but we have been working to better our workforce management,” says Mr Kakadia, who joined the family business only six months back. He says the way in which diamond companies have taken to advertising in the recent past speaks a lot of the changing face of the industry.

“From recruitment to marketing, diamond companies have changed. The formula is simple: think global and act local,” says twentysomething Keval Virani of Karp Impex. Virani, who’s just back from the UK after getting a degree in Mechatronics is in the process of joining the family business.