ERP Business Analyst in London

The London businesses that make, move and serve

The London ERP conversation often centers on professional firms and fintech, which my London ERP consultant page covers. This page is about a different group: companies whose requirements are shaped by production lines, loading bays and service counters inside a city where road space and floor space are both scarce.

Park Royal, in the west, is one of London's biggest industrial areas and home to many food producers supplying supermarkets, restaurants, airlines and caterers. The Lea Valley and estates in Barking, Dagenham and the Thames corridor hold wholesalers, importers and distributors. Around Heathrow, freight forwarders, handlers and flight caterers work to airline timetables. And across the center, restaurant, cafe and hotel groups run many sites with small storerooms and daily deliveries.

Each of these businesses has requirements that a generic template will miss. Space is expensive, so stock is held lean and replenished often. Access to central streets is constrained, so delivery promises depend on slots and routes. Staff often work in shifts and speak several languages, so screens and processes must be simple. My job as a business analyst is to capture all of this precisely enough that a vendor's demo has to address it.

Food producers: recipes, batches and label changes

A London food producer may make hundreds of products for a mix of retail, foodservice and airline customers, each with its own specifications. The ERP requirements start with the recipe: ingredients, yields, rework, packaging and the allergen and nutritional data that flows onto labels. A change to one ingredient can affect many finished products and their labels, so the system needs a controlled way to manage versions.

Traceability is the second pillar. I write requirements for recording supplier lot numbers at goods-in, linking them to production batches and following finished batches to each customer delivery. The test is simple and unforgiving: given a supplier lot, can the team list every affected customer quickly and accurately? I turn that into a scenario every shortlisted system must pass.

Labeling and food safety obligations, including allergen information rules, are interpreted by your technical and quality team and their advisors, not by me. What I do is make sure the data they need is captured once, held in the ERP or a linked specification system, and never retyped onto a label by hand. My UK food and beverage ERP page covers the wider sector requirements.

Wholesalers and forwarders: slots, routes and shipment margins

A wholesaler delivering into central London lives with constraints that wholesalers elsewhere may not face to the same degree. Customers such as restaurants, shops and offices often accept goods only at certain times. Some streets and loading areas restrict vehicle size or delivery hours. Emission zone and congestion charges can add cost to particular routes and vehicles. I capture these as requirements: order cut-off times by route, slot booking, vehicle eligibility, and how charges are recorded against deliveries so margin by customer stays honest.

Forwarders and importers near Heathrow and the Thames ports have a different problem. Each shipment carries its own quote, carrier costs, handling charges and duties, and those costs often arrive after the job is invoiced. Requirements here cover job costing at shipment level, accruals for costs not yet billed, customs data held against each consignment and alerts when actual margin falls below the quote. Customs and duty treatment is confirmed with your broker or advisor.

For both, I write scenarios from real orders and shipments rather than ideal ones, since the unusual cases are where systems fail. See my UK logistics ERP page for the broader view.

Multi-site hospitality: central kitchens and site stock

London restaurant, cafe and hotel groups often run a central production kitchen that supplies many small sites. Each site orders from the kitchen and from outside suppliers, holds a little stock in a tight storeroom, records waste and counts stock at set intervals. Head office wants a credible gross margin per site, which depends on all of those steps being recorded consistently.

The requirements I write cover internal ordering from sites to the central kitchen, transfer pricing between them, supplier ordering rules by site, waste categories, stock count routines that fit around service and the link between the till system and the ERP. Most groups keep a specialist point-of-sale system, so the integration requirements matter: which sales data moves, at what level of detail and how often.

Workforce realities shape the design. Site teams change frequently and may have limited time for system training, so I note which tasks must be quick on a phone or tablet and which can stay at head office. Payroll and rota tools usually remain separate, and I document what data needs to pass between them. The UK hospitality ERP page sets out sector-wide options.

Running business analysis remotely for site-based teams

Requirements work for an operating business is often assumed to need someone on site with a clipboard. In practice, a well-planned remote approach covers most of it. I ask a supervisor to walk the site on a video call: goods-in, production, dispatch, the storeroom. Shift leads join short interviews at times that suit their rota rather than one long workshop. Real documents, such as delivery notes, batch sheets, pick lists and supplier invoices, are shared and annotated together.

India is ahead of London, so early London shifts and the start of the office day fall inside my working afternoon, which suits interviews with operations teams who are busiest later. Process maps and draft requirements are shared after each round, so people can correct them in writing rather than waiting for the next meeting.

The engagement runs in English. Where staff are more comfortable in another language, a bilingual supervisor on your team joins the session or checks the notes. If a site visit would genuinely resolve something a video cannot, it can be planned by arrangement. The national requirements topics, such as VAT treatment and EU trade, are covered on my UK ERP business analyst page, and the method itself on ERP requirements gathering.