Programme architecture, transformation governance, and bespoke AI deployed inside your Unit4 estate. Delivered by a senior specialist with over a decade inside the system — not a partner-firm pyramid that learns on your time.
A deliberate combination most consultancies cannot ship: strategic ERP advisory, AI engineered to the system, and senior-level delivery embedded inside the client team.
UK councils running Unit4 have two consultancy options. Strategy houses who write convincing decks but cannot touch the system. Implementation partners who can touch the system but route every decision through a junior team and a project manager.
Bear Consulting is the third option: strategic-grade thinking from someone who can also write the SQL, configure the workflow, and deploy the AI — directly into the council's environment, on the council's timeline.
Programme architecture, governance design, transformation roadmaps. Multi-stream, multi-year. Authored at the level decision-makers actually need to commit budget against.
Bespoke AI applications and agents — RAG chatbots, continuous-monitoring intelligence, automated outreach — designed against Unit4's actual data model, not a generic LLM wrapper.
One senior specialist working as a peer inside the client's team. No partner-firm hierarchy, no junior consultants billing learning time, no methodology to sell around the work.
Four practice areas. Each one combines system-level depth with strategic framing — so the recommendation lands at the executive table and the change ships into Production.
Designing the programme structure that actually fits a UK council's reality: web client migration alongside payroll transformation alongside audit discharge alongside line manager training, sequenced and governed at executive level.
Most council Unit4 programmes fail because they were drawn as five comfortable pillars in a slide. Real ones run as eight to ten interlocking streams with explicit dependencies, owners, and decision rights. That's what gets delivered here.
RAG-based applications, continuous-monitoring intelligence, and bespoke agents built against the actual Unit4 schema — not a generic ChatGPT wrapper trained on a PDF library.
Currently in production or prototype: an HR policy chatbot on AWS Bedrock with Entra ID SSO; an integrity-monitoring alert framework detecting position dual-occupancy and SoD breaches; a productised diagnostic tool. Architected, built, and deployed by the same hands.
A formal capability model addressing every layer of the council's relationship with Unit4: end users, line managers, corporate operations, system support, and external system consultants. Each layer trained, documented, and equipped to operate without escalation.
Three-horizon structure: stabilise current pain, build internal capability, retire external dependency. The strategic point is exit — the council should not need this consultancy forever.
For councils under Section 114 notice, government commissioner oversight, or active external audit, control architecture is not optional. Continuous-monitoring queries, alert frameworks, and audit memoranda traceable from the raw table to the executive control statement.
Written to the standard a S.151 officer can sign without rework. Defensible at the next external audit cycle without an explanation paragraph.
Anonymised. Specifics, references, and named stakeholders available under NDA.
Authored and currently overseeing a Unit4 transformation programme spanning eight interlocking streams: web client migration for corporate operations, SCF migration, support transformation, line manager training, senior executive training, HR audit action discharges, payroll transformation, and continuous system improvement. Each stream with explicit owners, decision rights, and dependency mapping.
Designed, built and deployed PolicyAI: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation chatbot serving the council's full HR policy library, hosted on AWS Bedrock (eu-west-2) with Entra ID single sign-on. Tiered domain framework controls policy visibility by audience.
Five-layer capability model — end users, line managers, corporate operations, system support, system consultants — structured across three horizons. Authored from real ticket and incident analysis, not a generic curriculum.
Bucket positions silently held two resources concurrently — a long-standing data integrity exposure invisible to routine reporting. Designed and deployed an IntellAgent monitoring framework against live HR tables with codified exclusions.
Operational practice of editing the abwabsbalance table directly — bypassing HOL2 reconciliation — drafted as a critical audit finding. Traceable from raw table evidence to executive control implication.
Three rule types across awfsubstituterule, dynamic resolution via awfuserrule / awfuserfilter, role-based MSS filtering — none previously documented. Reverse-engineered, validated against live data, and written into a reference document.
Where the same problem appears across multiple councils, the work is packaged. Fixed scope, fixed price, deliberately structured around how UK local government actually procures.
An HR policy chatbot for council staff. Retrieval-augmented generation over the council's actual policy library, hosted on AWS Bedrock (eu-west-2) with Entra ID single sign-on. Tiered domain framework controls which policies surface to which audience.
Deployed at first reference council with HR-Director approval. Available as a packaged offer for councils with comparable HR policy estates.
A structured strategic diagnostic of a Unit4 Business World installation: configuration drift, defect inventory, control gaps, undocumented architecture, and capability deficit. Delivered as a written executive-grade assessment with prioritised remediation roadmap.
Priced deliberately below typical single-officer authorisation thresholds in UK local government — so the engagement can be authorised without committee.
A specialist consultancy operating as a sole practice — by design, not by stage of growth.
Founded by Mircea Rogojan-Rush, Bear Consulting Services 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 practice is sole-practitioner by design. 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 clients who fit are councils that have lived with their Unit4 estate for years, accumulated configuration debt and capability gaps, and now need someone who can think strategically about transformation while also writing the AI prompt, the SQL, and the audit memo.
If your council's Unit4 estate carries strategic risk — failed transformation, audit exposure, capability gap, or AI ambition with no route to delivery — start with a thirty-minute call. No slides.
A brief outline of the strategic problem, the modules involved, and the urgency. A personal response within one working day.
For first engagements, the typical entry point is a fixed-price Unit4 X-Ray scoped to a defined area of the estate.