Rudex · 2021 – active

Operations system for an explosives manufacturer

The story

A 200-person company became a 300+ person company without growing management.

One system runs procurement, production, the warehouse and finance at Rudex, replacing the paper, scanned PDFs and spreadsheets that four departments ran on.

Worth noting

· Nobody types the same data three or four times anymore
· Five versions in, the client keeps funding the next one
· Management no longer waits for reports from the office

The problem

With over 200 employees, the cost of coordination had become the bottleneck. Production planning, dispatch, warehouses, procurement, finance and reporting were not joined up. Departments handed work over by word of mouth, and people entered the same data three or four times along the chain. Every procedure in the explosives industry has to be auditable and compliant, so nobody could change one on the fly. The system had to fit how Rudex works, down to each role and action.

Outcome

Rudex grew from about 200 to 300+ employees with no proportional growth in management or accounting. Every step in the chain is on record. The engagement has since produced more work: the Face-ID and breathalyser gate at the entrance, the rudex.rs public site, and a small tool that turns bank statements into the format the legacy bookkeeping imports.

What we built

Documents move between departments by the system's rules. A purchase request becomes a supplier order, the warehouse receives the goods, a work order consumes them against its norms, the output goes into stock, and a dispatch note sends it out with a vehicle and driver attached. Each person sees only what their job requires. Dispatch notes, work orders and reports come out as PDFs from the same record, so nobody rewrites them. Management opens the same system on a phone and follows production, stock and dispatch wherever they are.

What it covers

Procurement, production and norms, warehouses and stock, items and reference data, customers and suppliers, dispatch and delivery, fleet and drivers, finance, roles and permissions, PDF documents, mobile access.

How we approached it

The first step was breaking the company down to the level of role and action. We sat with employees in every department and modelled the work as it happens. Every paper form counted as evidence of a crack in the process. From that we built the data model and the rules each document follows, checked them with the client and closed every edge case before development, because finding problems in a live system would have been unacceptable. When a version stabilises, we start the next round of improvements.

Other work we did for this client

rudex.rsThe company's public site, with a custom analytics module.
Bank statement automationA small Python app that converts bank statements from PDF to a CSV format the legacy bookkeeping imports directly. We eliminated manual re-entry without changing the accounting system.