Generic inventory software assumes a clean purchase-to-sale path. Small manufacturers also use job-work issue and receipt documents, delivery challans that move goods without a sale, partial returns, process loss, and conversion costs. If several documents can quietly change the same stock, staff enter things twice and stop trusting the inventory figure.
02 / Vertical AI · B2B SaaS · Operations
AI-Enabled Manufacturing Operations ERP
Brand: ORENX
Inventory and billing software for small Indian manufacturers, built around the material movements that generic invoice-first tools often miss: outside processing, partial returns, scrap, production, and warehouse transfers.
In each workflow, exactly one document is allowed to change stock. Quotes, orders, invoices, and planning records point back to that movement instead of changing inventory again. This rule keeps the stock figure traceable and prevents double counting.
ORENX is live at orenx.in with 22 document types covering sales, purchases, inventory, production, outsourced job work, returns, and transfers. It also supports separate company data, GST-ready records, E-Way Bill file export, reporting, OCR, and AI-assisted features.
The product is built and in use. The next step is to measure adoption, task completion time, correction rates, and which screen labels still make users ask for help.
01
User and problem
Who needed this product, and why.
Owners and staff at small Indian manufacturers and traders who need GST-ready paperwork without losing track of material held by a subcontractor, moving between warehouses, or changing form during production.
Small factories do not run on invoices alone. Material leaves for a subcontractor, comes back as finished goods and scrap, moves between warehouses, or is consumed in production, and none of those events is necessarily a sale. I rebuilt ORENX around 22 document types, each with an explicit rule for whether it changes stock, records a future commitment, or bills work that already happened.
02
Important decisions
Decision 01
Give job work its own documents
- Why it mattered
- Materials can leave for outside processing, return as finished goods and scrap, or move between locations without a sale taking place.
- What I did
- Use separate job-work issue and receipt documents with their own stock and costing rules instead of making one delivery document mean different things in different screens.
- What it required
- Users have to learn a few more document types, but each document keeps one clear meaning and stock does not change through hidden side effects.
- The result
- Every movement records what happened and why, so inventory, supplier balances, returns, production costs, and GST records can be reconciled without guesswork.
Decision 02
Avoid a costly compliance API
- Why it mattered
- An E-Way Bill is required for many goods movements in India. Entering one manually took about 2 to 3 minutes across more than 15 fields, while the available API cost more each year than the client paid for the software.
- What I did
- Generate a GSTN-compatible JSON file from existing ORENX records for bulk upload to the government portal instead of buying the API connection.
- What it required
- The user still completes one upload step, but avoids a recurring vendor bill and the maintenance of another backend integration.
- The result
- The export runs in the browser and writes the government's required file format from data already in ORENX, without a new backend service or database migration.
Decision 03
Show a smaller true number
- Why it mattered
- One dashboard label described a document count as material still held by vendors, and a separate production-history query silently returned no records.
- What I did
- Fix the broken query and rename each statistic to describe exactly what it counts instead of keeping a broader, more impressive label.
- What it required
- The dashboard presents a narrower number, but users know what it means and can act on it safely.
- The result
- The correction restored production history and clarified the metric without changing any of the seven rules that protect stock movement and costing.
03
What I built
What the product includes and how it works.
- 22 business and manufacturing document types, each with defined stock and costing behavior
- Dedicated flows for job-work issue and receipt, production, warehouse transfers, returns, and scrap
- GST-ready documents plus an E-Way Bill file generated in the browser for bulk government-portal upload
- A navigation and naming redesign after users struggled to distinguish similar manufacturing screens
- AI features redesigned to use fewer model calls per task, reducing wait time and per-user cost
How it works. ORENX keeps each company's data separate and gives every document type its own fields, status changes, and stock rules. Related inventory updates are saved together so a partly completed entry cannot leave stock inconsistent. Compliance files are generated from the same business records, while OCR and AI assistance reduce repeated data entry and help users find information.
04
What exists today
The product supports 22 types of business and manufacturing documents
These cover sales, purchases, inventory, production, job work, returns, and transfers.A third-party E-Way Bill connection would have cost about ₹11,800 or more each year
I chose a compatible file export to avoid that recurring cost. Vendor pricing can change.Entering one E-Way Bill manually took about 2 to 3 minutes
This recalled working estimate was used to decide which part of the process to automate.User adoption and time saved still need to be measured
The product is live, but these results are not yet tracked in a reliable dashboard.05
Reflection
What I learned, and what I would test next.
- A product built for one industry can handle the messy exceptions that general software treats as rare edge cases.
- Partial automation can be the better product when customers will pay for it and it removes the most frustrating step.
- A dashboard should say exactly what each number measures, even when the accurate label sounds less impressive.
Let’s discuss the product problem.