Electronic solutions promise end to labor-intensive work

“Banks have machines for counting notes. Nobody would seriously expect a bank teller to do it by hand anymore. Similarly, counting and weighing diamonds can, and should, be done by a machine. Now they can be.”

As any diamantaire will attest, the most mundane part of the job on a daily basis is sorting, weighing and measuring diamonds. But those tasks are also amongst the most important with plenty of room for mistakes, both accidental and intentional, which potentially can lead to large losses. Many are the diamond offices that have had experience of diamonds being wrongly sorted and weighed and of stock mysteriously going missing. In addition to those problems, there is the issue of cutting costs at a time when profit margins are being slashed and reducing labor-intensive tasks is a prime candidate.

The solution would appear to be simple, that is to say the development of machinery that will carry out the tasks automatically. But, perhaps not surprisingly given the conservative and old-fashioned approach that characterizes much of the diamond trade, automatic devices have not really been developed. Traditional weighing scales, although widely used, are notoriously prone to giving the wrong information. Somewhat unwieldy, scales need to be on a perfectly flat surface and steps have to be taken to prevent outside factors, such as drafts caused by air conditioning or doors and windows being opened at the critical point. Needless to say, they are also far from being mobile and thus do not lend themselves to being transported from office to office.

Given this background and the lack of high-tech equipment available to the diamond trade, it should perhaps not come as a surprise that an Israeli firm has developed two machines, one for automatically counting diamonds, and the other for weighing and measuring the diameter of diamonds. The company, DATA Technology Inc., was founded in 2001, with the majority shareholder being Kibbutz Ramat Rachel in Jerusalem which at the time was looking for investment opportunities among start-up high-tech firms with interesting and innovative new technologies.

Initially, the company set itself the target of creating a machine that would weigh and sort rough diamonds, explains Managing Director Yuval Lichi. “While developing the technology, we said ‘why don’t we make a device that can weigh stones individually’, and that was the start of the development of the VIBE-135 handheld device.” The VIBE-135, officially launched at the Hong Kong Jewellery and Watch Fair in September 2006 and the only such device in the world, can weigh all shapes of polished stones, from 0.005 to 1.2 carats, in an instant and is also able to measure the diameter of the diamond without any calibration. The VIBE-135 operates using a specially developed vibration technology and being portable, light and compact, it clearly presents significant advantages over traditional weighing scales.

It carries out both tasks to an extremely high level of accuracy, and uses proprietary software, that can be easily adapted to a user’s computer, for the processing of results which can be automatically stored in an Excel sheet. Working with traditional weighing machines, in addition to their other problems, is also a time-consuming, tedious process meaning mistakes are inevitable. The VIBE-135, however, which weighs just 135 grams, enables users to pick up a stone and in an instant to see its weight and diameter on a small screen which are automatically recorded, before moving on to the next diamond. As DATA Technology Inc Chairman Dov Nardimon explains, the VIBE-135 can be easily taken from office to office without the need to be calibrated or prepared in any other way. It can also, of course, be taken from country to country by diamantaires and used on their buying trips. “A diamantaire flying to Belgium, Israel, New York or, indeed, any other diamond center on a buying trip simply packs the VIBE-135 and can use it instantly without any pre-preparation of the office environment which is needed for traditional weighing machines,” Nardimon said. Sales of the VIBE-135 started in September when the diamond industry returned from the August vacation.

The other machine that DATA Technology Inc. has developed is the Diamond Count machine which counts rough, semi-processed and very low-cost polished diamonds. With close to 100 percent accuracy, the instrument can count 600 to 1,200 diamonds per minute depending on size. The machine can be quickly configured to count diamonds ranging from 0.04 carats to 1.80 carats, and can count up to 1,200 carats in just minutes. The machine will count a pre-set number of diamonds and will separate parcels into smaller ones. The Diamond Count machine operates using an ingenious system, in which diamonds are channeled past a light source that is focused upon a light detector. Every time a stone passes in front of the light source, the light flow is interrupted and the system counts one diamond. Although the technology is used by devices in several industries, it is the first time that it has been employed in the diamond business.

As with the VIBE-135, the use of Bluetooth wireless technology enables the transmission of counting results directly to a company’s inventory software or to an Excel sheet, thus foregoing the traditional requirement for manual input with all the consequences this entails for entering mistakes, both intentional and unintentional. The Diamond Count machine has been extensively tested at offices in India which DATA Technology Inc regards as the main market for the instrument since it is by far the world’s largest processing center. It expects to start signing sales deals with Indian companies from September onwards, in addition to closing contracts with firms in other major trading centers such as Antwerp, New York and Israel.

Feedback from the beta sites at which the machine has been tested confirm that it is regarded as simple and easy to use whilst saving a great deal of time and preventing mistakes. DATA Technology Inc is also forecasting widespread sales of the machine since there is no other product on the market that provides the functions of the Diamond Count machine. In an age when people expect machines to be able to quickly take care of time-consuming tasks that have been carried out manually for many generations, DATA Technology Inc believes it can provide the machinery needed by the diamond industry. “Banks have machines for counting notes,” says Managing Director Yuval Lichi. “Nobody would seriously expect a bank teller to do it by hand anymore. Similarly, counting and weighing diamonds can, and should, be done by a machine. Now they can be.”

Perhaps the most important commendation for the counting machine comes from the sale of five larger counting machines to Canadian diamond miner Aber Corporation. Aber has been using the machines to weigh its output from the Diavik mine in Canada’s North West Territories for almost two years. A total of 7,000 carats of stones can be poured into the machine which can count diamonds weighing up to 10 carats in size.

In general, says Lichi, the aim for the designers of the state-of-the-art equipment is to give diamond offices the most up-to-date technology providing close to 100 percent accuracy with portable machines that are simple to set up and quickly put to use due to their highly intuitive features which enables costs to be cut from the outset. Getting started with the equipment, says Lichi, is a simple task which he compares to ‘plug-and-play’ computer goods.

The company’s management includes Yuval Lichi, an industrial designer who was involved in developing patents for various products, and Chairman Dov Nardimon, an industrial engineer who has more than three decades of management experience at some of Israel’s leading manufacturing companies. Nardimon was brought in to give DATA Technology Inc the benefit of his wide management skills in engineering and international marketing. The commercialization of the original project, taking it from the drawing board and making it into a product that can be used in diamond offices, was an important part of his initial tasks. Now, Nardimon is busy with business development of the machines.

A crucial step in the development of the company was bringing in diamond industry veteran Shlomo Tidhar to serve on its advisory board. DATA Technology Inc has also benefited from the recruitment of Tidhar’s son Ari, the third generation of the family to work in diamonds, who worked with his father for several years in the diamond trade before studying computer science and working for some of Israel’s leading high-tech firms. In addition to serving as a software engineer, Ari, who knows the diamond industry’s working patterns and needs, has been involved in developing the design and user interface of the VIBE-135.

Nardimon says the company’s strategy is to develop instruments for the diamond industry that can also be used for the gemstone industry. “We have started with the diamond industry, but in the future we will be able to develop tools that will help the gemstone industry to improve its costing. As for the future, the company believes the next generation of its products will be an integrated system for the counting, sorting and weighing of diamonds.