Redmine

I work for a small Apple Authorized Service Provider as the lead technician. Currently the internal system we use to track repairs, customers, parts etc. is horrible mishmash of quickly cobbled together FileMaker databases and Excel spreadsheets. I want to build a new web-based system and thought Redmine might be a good starting point. However, as far as I can tell certain critical functions don't appear to be supported even with currently available plugins (yet).

I'd really appreciate comments from site members who are have a good understanding of Redmine's code, plugin architechture etc. about the feasibility of extending Redmine for our purposes through the development of new plugin(s) or by other means. The main additional components that I would need to develop are a simple inventory management database with the ability to assign parts from inventory to repairs (i.e. issues), and integration with Apple's Global Service Exchange Web Services via SOAP. I'm a relative beginner with Ruby, Rails and Redmine, so I expect this to be a challenge, but I'd like to know now if it's one that will be practically insurmountable. I hope to eventually be able to release these plugins etc. to the community.

If Redmine is unsuitable or too difficult to adapt to my needs, I'd appreciate any pointers to alternative OSS solutions that might be closer to what I'm looking for.

I'm re-posting the above message in this forum in the hope of getting a response, since my first post in the "Open discussion" forum has remained unanswered after 4 days...