The problem
Production planning, dispatch, warehouses, procurement, finance, and reporting weren't centralized enough; there was a lot of paper, scanned PDFs, and verbal handoffs between departments. The same data was entered three or four times through the chain. Errors could happen, and with over 200 employees the coordination cost — not the production cost — was becoming the bottleneck. In the explosives industry, where every procedure must be auditable and compliant, "we'll just change the procedure quickly" was not an option. The system had to fit the way the company actually functions — down to the lowest level of role and action.
What we built
We developed a custom operational system that replaces forms, scanning, and re-entry with clearly defined state machines — documents move through departments by the system's rules, not by agreement or phone call. The system covers the entire operational chain: from procurement (requisitions, supplier orders) through goods receipt and production (work orders with norms and produced-quantity tracking), to warehouse operations (stock, transactions, transfers, material issues, adjustments), dispatch and delivery (dispatch notes and delivery notes), then finance (currencies, exchange rates) and reporting. PDF documents — dispatch notes, work orders, reports — are generated server-side from the same data, without manual rewording. Everything is also accessible from a phone — management tracks what's happening in production, the warehouse, and dispatch regardless of where they are, without waiting for reports from the office.
Modules & surfaces
- Procurement and requisitionsInternal procurement requests, supplier orders with change history, automatic status tracking through to receipt.
- Production and normsWork orders with defined input norms, tracking of produced quantities and consumed material — all auditable, all connected to the warehouse.
- Warehouses and stockWarehouses, stock, transactions, transaction groups, transfers between warehouses, material issues, stock adjustments, and an aggregated overview of item status.
- Items and reference dataItems with images, categories, types, units of measure — a single source of truth for everything the company produces and uses.
- PartnersCustomers and suppliers in one register, with document and transaction history.
- Dispatch and deliveryDispatch notes, delivery notes, connection with the vehicle fleet and drivers — from warehouse to customer in one flow.
- Fleet and driversVehicles, drivers, locations and facilities / plants — operational infrastructure alongside all documents that use it.
- FinanceCurrencies, exchange rates, integration with the National Bank of Serbia.
- Users and views by roleDetailed roles and permissions; each user sees exactly what their job requires, with saved personal views.
- PDF documentsServer-generated documents (dispatch notes, work orders, reports) from the same database — no manual rewording, no mismatch with the actual state.
- Mobile accessThe same system, the same data, from a phone. Rudex management tracks production, dispatch, stock, and reports wherever they are, any time.
How we approached it
We started by breaking down the company to the level of role and action — we sat with employees in every department and modelled what they actually do, not what's written in the org chart. Forms were treated as evidence of cracks in the process, not as the process itself. From that discovery we built an entity model and state machines, validated them with the client, and closed all edge cases before development — the cost of finding problems in production would have been unacceptable. Five versions later, we're still in a continuous engagement: when one version stabilizes, we immediately enter the next phase of improvements.
Outcome
Rudex grew from ~200 to 300+ employees with no proportional growth in management or accounting. The system is currently in its 5th version, the client continuously funds further development, and other Rudex projects came out of the relationship — the Face-ID alcohol tester, the rudex.rs marketing site, and the automation of bank-statement conversion into the format for the legacy bookkeeping.
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.