case studies/habbal mis

The archive was a room. The work orders were handwritten.

Habbal's entire design and production history lived in physical files, and every job that reached the bench started as a draft written out by hand. We replaced both with one system that designers, management, production and trade partners all work in.

700+
products in the catalogue
~40
variants per product, on average
4
roles, from designers to trade partners
6 weeks
in production, against eight committed
THE SYSTEM
A product record in the Habbal MIS: the Vintage Ring Halo and its 28 variants, each with its own SKU, stock status and weight
› WHAT IT REPLACED

Paper is a fine archive until two people need it at once.

A physical archive works when one person is looking something up. It stops working when a designer needs last year’s specification while production is holding the same folder, when management wants to know what is in progress, and when a trade partner asks whether a piece can still be made.

Handwritten work orders have the same shape of problem. They are fast to produce and impossible to search, aggregate or audit. Nobody can answer how many jobs are open without walking to the bench and counting.

This was not a digitisation project in the scanning sense. The requirement was a system that holds every piece Habbal makes or intends to make, in enough detail that a work order can be issued from it, and that four different kinds of user can be let into without letting all of them see everything.

› WHAT A RECORD HOLDS

One record per piece, and every variant of it

A record covers a piece Habbal manufactures, or intends to manufacture. Across 700-odd products at roughly forty variants each, the system holds close to thirty thousand variant records, and each one has to be complete enough to work from.

01
Every variant
Not one entry per variant. One entry per design, holding each combination of stone, metal, size and finish it is made in.
02
Renders
The visual for each variant, so a piece can be identified and shown without anyone opening a production file.
03
Production files
The working files the bench needs. The record is the source a job is issued from, not a reference to a file kept elsewhere.
04
Specifications
Materials, dimensions, stone details and the rest of what makes a piece reproducible years after it was designed.
05
Details and history
The context around a piece: what it is, what it relates to, and where it sits in the catalogue.
06
Inventory
What exists now, held against the same record as the design, so stock and specification cannot drift apart.
The variant count is the part that decides the architecture. Forty variants of one ring are not forty products; they are one design with forty sets of stones, metals, sizes and finishes, each with its own render and its own production file. Model them as separate products and the archive becomes unnavigable. Model them as options on a single record and the whole catalogue stays browsable.
› WHO IS IN IT

Four roles, one record, different views of it

The reason this could not be a shared drive. Everyone works from the same record, and no two of them should see the same thing.

CREATE AND REVISE
Designers
Add pieces and variants, attach renders and production files, and revise a design without losing what came before it.
WORK FROM IT
Production
Take work orders from the record itself, with the specification and files attached, instead of from a handwritten draft.
SEE ACROSS IT
Management
Look across the catalogue and what is in progress, which was not answerable at all when the archive was physical.
VIEW ONLY
B2B partners
A read-only window onto what they are permitted to see, so trade enquiries do not go through somebody at Habbal.
› HOW IT SITS

Standalone by design, connected by choice

Node.jsNext.jsPostgreSQL

The MIS runs on its own. It is not a plugin on the storefront and it does not stop working if the store changes, which matters because the archive has to outlive any given commerce platform.

It can link to the store when that is useful, so a piece that exists as a design record can become something sellable without being re-entered. What it will not do is depend on the store for its own definition of a product, because the store only ever needs the subset that is for sale, and the archive needs everything, including pieces that were never listed and pieces not yet made.

› OUTCOME

What changed on the floor

THE ONE THAT MATTERS
The archive is available to everyone at once
A folder can be in one place. A record can be open on the design desk, in the workshop and in a partner’s browser simultaneously, which is a change in kind rather than a change in speed.
WORK ORDERS
Issued from the record, not written out
A job now carries the specification, the render and the production file it was generated from, so the bench is not working from a transcription of a drawing somebody made by hand.
DELIVERY
Live two weeks inside the commitment
Committed to eight weeks, in production in six. The scope did not shrink to get there; the variant model settled early, and everything after it was assembly rather than discovery.
TRADE ACCESS
Partners look it up themselves
A B2B partner asking whether a piece can still be made used to be a phone call and a walk to the archive. It is now a read-only login.
“If I needed last season’s specification I went to the archive and hoped nobody else had the folder. Now I open the record and every variant is there with its render and its production file. What I use most is being able to check what we have already made, before I start drawing something we made two years ago.”
Efra Hakan
Designer, working with Habbal Jewellery
If the thing holding your business together is a folder or a spreadsheet, that is a first sprint.
Book a scoping callThe Habbal storefront