NetSuite for Jewelry and Precious Metals

When the raw material is priced by the gram, the interesting number is not how much you produced — it is how much of the metal you started with can still be accounted for. Standard ERP manufacturing does not ask that question, so most shops answer it in a spreadsheet.

What Makes Precious Metals Different

• Scrap is not waste. Sprue, filings, polishing sweeps and bench scrap are recoverable inventory with real value.
• Weight in must reconcile to weight out. Across casting, finishing and setting, at every stage.
• Material moves between forms. Casting grain becomes a tree, becomes castings, becomes scrap that becomes grain again.
• Every gram needs an owner. Attribution is not bureaucracy when the material is this valuable.

How the Suite Covers It

Casting runs as batch work orders

BatchWizard creates and sequences casting work orders from formula masters, so a casting campaign is planned as a campaign. FlexBom keeps alloy compositions versioned.

Recovery recorded, not estimated

CoYield records sprue, scrap and recovered metal as outputs against the specific completion that produced them, with their own lot, bin and inventory status — so recovery enters inventory rather than being reconciled at month end. YieldCraft reconciles the metal issued against the metal accounted for and requires the difference to be allocated against real inventory.

Attribution at the bench

FactoryBridge records component issue with lot and bin against each operation, times setup and run separately, and attributes every entry to an operator with a timestamp in a filterable audit log. When material this valuable moves, the record says who moved it.

Where the metal actually is

The awkward question in a jewelry operation is not what is in the vault, it is what is on the benches. Material issued to an operation is recorded against that operation, by lot and bin, at the moment it is issued — so work in progress is a set of records rather than an estimate, and the difference between metal issued and metal returned is visible per job and per operator rather than per month. Combined with separately timed setup and run, that also gives labor cost against the same job the metal was issued to.

Weight-based material

CatchIQ handles variable-weight items with dual UOM tracking, and Repack Orders covers splitting and recombining lots as material changes form.

Related reading: lot traceability, batch manufacturing, and NetSuite MES.