Client Testimonials
South Africa’s leading infrastructure development and construction materials supply groups
Originally Bluebird was contracted to maintain a 2nd generation system for Raubex Building Group. As this system started scaling it started to show some serious cracks. After about a year and a half, we convinced Raubex to rebuild this from the ground up.
Services We Offered Raubex
- System Architecture
- Back-end Development
- Infrastructure Design
- Database Design
- Web Development
The Challenge
Concept Behind the Product
The system needs to cater for the day-to-day operations at Raubex. This involves loading requisitions, creating orders and managing deliveries.
Gap in the Market
No affordable systems exist that focus specifically on the “building world”. A new system could open up the possibilities of automating tasks that have been manual up to this point.
The Problem
The previous system was very slow and sometimes even unusable. Some processes are manual and Excel-based.
The Bluebird Approach
What we needed to know
- Understand possible Architecture constraints (cloud hosting, email server hosting, internal firewall access, etc.).
- Determine regular process flows to optimise for scaling
- Distill core concepts that would define the system
- We needed to determine a breakdown of all the intended roles and permissions
How we uncovered this information
- Meetings with internal IT department
- Domain knowledge acquired by working on older system
- Calls and meetings with stakeholders
The Bluebird Process
The Design Process
- Determined which parts of the old system could be reused to not reinvent the wheel.
- Created wireframes to visualise the website flow and function.
- Created multiple iterations of entity relationship diagrams (ERD) to flesh out possible database structures.
The Build Process
- Hosted all infrastructure on Azure, with repo and CI/CD on Github.
- Opted for a code-first database option to facilitate easy changes and maintenance.
- Used our own internal boilerplate for the website structure (react, tailwind, d-man, etc.).
- Domain driven design principles on the backend to clean up the structure and make it more manageable and scalable.
What we achieved
What we built is the main system actively used at the company today
- A fully fledged user management and permission based system
- Ability to create, edit, and delete orders and requisitions
- Procedures to action deliveries and call-offs
- Functionality to export orders and deliveries to external accounting system.
- Ability to produce PDF quotes, orders and delivery notes.
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