About — Bear Consulting Services

Bear Consulting is built around a single conviction: that strategic ERP advisory and AI engineering are the same discipline, and that UK councils get cheated when those disciplines arrive in separate consultancy pyramids.

The standard model — strategy partner authors the deck, implementation partner does the build, internal team is left holding the system — is structurally broken. It produces transformation programmes that look defensible on paper and collapse under operational reality. By the time the council realises, the strategy partner is gone and the implementation partner is billing on a fixed-scope variation.

The alternative is to compress the chain. One senior specialist who can think strategically about the council's Unit4 estate, design the AI products that sit on top of it, and ship the configuration changes that make the whole thing work. No handovers. No translation losses. No partner-firm overhead.

The councils that get value from Unit4 have someone who knows the system at the parameter level, the strategic level, and the political level — and that someone is in the room when the decisions are made.

That is what this consultancy is for.

Engagements are retained, embedded, and deliberately capped. Typically one or two concurrent councils. The economics work because there are no juniors to subsidise, no methodology to sell around the work, and no partner-firm overhead to fund.

The consultant works inside the client's team — at the change board, at the audit meeting, at the systems standup, at the executive briefing. Not as an outside vendor delivering quarterly status decks, but as a peer with privileged access to the data and the decision-makers.

Engagement model: retained senior specialist, with day-rate or fixed-scope variations depending on the work. Inside-IR35 where required. Deliverables are production-grade and shippable on the same day they are presented — not statements of intent that need a separate implementation phase.

Founded and operated by Mircea Rogojan-Rush, working with UK public sector clients on Unit4 Business World since the early 2010s.

Specialism: Unit4 Business WorldHR, Payroll, Absence, Finance, AR — strategy and AI integration
Experience: 10+ yearsinside the Unit4 Business World ecosystem
Sector focus: UK public sectorLocal government, statutory bodies, S.114 environments
Engagement model: Embedded specialistRetained, inside-IR35 where required
Current footprint: UK unitary authorityOperating under government commissioner oversight
Location: Chelmsford, EssexUK-wide engagement

Bear Consulting is not a fit for every Unit4 council. The engagement model assumes a particular set of conditions on the client side.

Mature Unit4 estate with accumulated debt

Councils that have lived with their installation for years and now carry configuration drift, undocumented architecture, defects nobody has root-caused, and capability gaps that show up in every audit.

Senior buyer who can authorise without committee

S.151 Officer, Director of Financial Management, Head of Systems, HR Director — someone with the seniority to commission specialist work, the appetite for direct engagement, and the budget authority to act without a six-month procurement cycle.

Strategic decision approaching

A cloud migration, ERP replacement, payroll transformation, audit response, or AI deployment — something where the council needs a clearer view of its current Unit4 reality before committing to the next move.

Internal team capable of receiving the work

The exit point of every engagement is the council's own team operating without external dependency. Councils with no internal Unit4 capability will not get value from this model — they need a different kind of consultancy.

Most current and recent client work is anonymised on this site by default. Senior council stakeholders, particularly those operating under Section 114 notice or commissioner oversight, are not in a position to feature publicly as references.

References, named stakeholders, sample deliverables and detailed case material are available under NDA on request. The standard process is a thirty-minute scoping call followed by a mutual NDA and shared materials package within one working week.

Where named permission is granted, this site is updated. Where it is not, the engagement remains confidential indefinitely. That is the deal.