UK manufacturing & distribution · £20m–£500m
Three platform cliffs and nine regulatory dates land before October 2027. They are one programme, not twelve projects.
Your ERP estate, your customs data, your packaging master and your statutory filing all break inside the same window — and most of them break because of the same missing thing: data the ERP was never asked to hold. Funded separately, they cost multiples of what they should and sequence in an order that cannot work.
The wall
Every date below is legislated or published, bar one which is marked as derived. Counts update live. Each row has a page.
The thesis
Get the estate current, and hold data the ERP was never asked to hold.
Every item on the wall resolves to one of those two jobs. SQL Server 2016 died in July; an estate still on it is, by definition, on a Sage X3 patch level that cannot run SQL 2019 or 2022 — so the database migration and the ERP upgrade are one project, not two. Anyone selling you a standalone database migration is mis-selling.
The mandates are the other half. CBAM wants net mass excluding packaging to six decimal places by eight-digit commodity code, retained six years. EUDR wants due-diligence reference numbers propagated to the purchase order, the goods receipt and the sales line. Packaging EPR, PPWR and the deposit return scheme all want the same SKU-level packaging bill of materials, built once. None of that is reporting. All of it is master data and transaction design.
Which is why the sequence matters more than the individual answers: the compliance data has to land on an estate that can still take a patch. Do it the other way round and you pay for the build twice.
One more thing worth saying plainly, because it changes how you should specify the work. The master data these mandates force you to build — clean item and supplier masters, lot lineage that survives a transformation, weights and compositions that reconcile to the ledger — is the same data any automation you buy later will have to run on. That is not a reason to gold-plate it. It is a reason to build it once, properly, on the compliance budget that already exists, rather than three times on budgets that do not.
Engagements
Fixed scope, fixed price, dated output. Not a day rate.
Four rungs, deliberately. You should be able to test whether this is worth anything before you spend a penny, and buy the first paid step without writing a board paper.
The two assessments answer different questions and are often bought together. The Health Check asks what is wrong today and what cash is trapped in it. The Convergence Assessment asks what binds you between now and 2027, and in what order it has to be done.
Free · 3 minutes
Exposure check
No charge · self-serve · no email required to see the result
Twelve questions about your estate and your trade. Returns the dated list of what actually binds you, in sequence.
- Answers stay in your browser — nothing is sent unless you choose to
- Every result links to the underlying primary source
- Usually enough to know whether the next conversation is worth having
Step one · pays for itself
Operations Health Check
£3,000 fixed · 5 days
Twenty-four diagnostics run against your live folder, and every finding quantified in cash rather than in severity ratings.
- Working capital — open sales orders past promised delivery, DSO against contracted terms, stock stale beyond 365 days, GRNI uninvoiced over 60 days, open POs long past required date
- Close cycle — where the month-end actually goes, and which reconciliations are carrying the delay
- Data integrity — ten checks on the master data everything downstream depends on
- Support-floor statement — X3 patch level against SQL Server and Windows Server lifecycle, per environment, because none of the above is actionable on an estate that cannot take a patch
- Executive summary ranked by cash impact, with effort, priority and named owner against each finding — plus the query appendix, so your team can re-run any of it without me
Step two
Convergence Assessment
£12,000 fixed · 3 weeks
What binds you, when, and in what order — as one costed programme a board can approve.
- Mandate exposure register: CBAM, EUDR, pEPR, PPWR, DRS, EU e-invoicing, Companies House — scoped in or out with the reasoning written down
- Gap analysis at field level, not theme level
- Sequenced critical path with dated dependencies and a costed option set
- Board paper you can table without rewriting
- Credited in full against a build engagement started within 90 days
Build
CBAM Reporting Spine
from £18,000 · returns retainer from £1,200/qtr
The UK charge starts 1 January 2027. The data model has to exist months before that, inside purchasing.
- Net mass excluding packaging to six decimal places, by eight-digit commodity code
- Embedded emissions capture at supplier and item level, with a defensible default fallback
- Reconciliation across purchase order, goods receipt, customs entry and the general ledger
- Six-year retention with lineage that survives an ERP upgrade
- Quarterly return preparation, or the runbook so your team does it
Build
Packaging Data Spine
from £24,000 · annual reporting retainer
One SKU-level packaging bill of materials, built once, serving three regimes and every retailer catalogue.
- Component-level packaging BOM: material, weight, recyclability, recycled content
- pEPR modulated fee position, with the sensitivity on next year's fee bands
- PPWR declaration of conformity per packaging type, plus the traceable identifier
- DRS: GTIN reallocation plan across in-scope containers and multipacks, with the artwork and EDI resync calendar
- Annual submission run, retailer catalogue republication included
What I won't sell you
Five things being actively marketed at you right now that are not worth your budget this year.
Published because it is the fastest way to show you what the rest of the advice is worth. Each was checked against the primary source, not the press release.
UK e-invoicing 2029 readiness
The commitment is "from 2029" — no month, no standard formally selected, no legislation laid. Peppol is heavily signalled but not decided. The roadmap lands at the 28 October 2026 Budget. Nobody can responsibly build against a specification that does not yet exist. The date is on the wall so you can wait deliberately rather than by accident.
EU AI Act readiness
Annex III high-risk moved from August 2026 to December 2027; Annex I to August 2028. The deadline slipped sixteen months. What binds a UK manufacturer today is small: documented AI-literacy measures, disclosure on customer-facing bots, prohibited-practice avoidance.
CSRD supplier questionnaires
Post-Omnibus scope is now more than 1,000 employees and more than €450m turnover, and the statutory value-chain cap gives smaller suppliers a legal right to decline information requests. If you are being asked to fund a response programme, check first whether you are obliged to answer at all.
GS1 Sunrise 2027
A retailer capability target — not a mandate, not a supplier obligation. Linear barcodes continue to be accepted. The real barcode forcing function is the deposit return scheme, it lands 1 October 2027, and it is a completely different piece of work.
Generic AI transformation
Two per cent of UK manufacturers have AI widely embedded, and 83% of manufacturing AI use is back-office, not the line. A third of UK businesses that "invested in AI" spent under £25,000. There is real value in narrow, boring automation on your own data — that is a line item inside a programme, not a programme.
Who you are dealing with
These programmes fail at one seam. I work both sides of it.
Fungayi Kuyayama. Twenty years across finance and ERP delivery in UK, European, Chinese and African manufacturing, and a certified Sage X3 developer from V6 through V12. I have owned the month-end, and I have written the query behind it.
The seam is the joint between the statutory instrument, the ERP schema and the general ledger. It is normally where the accountant stops and the developer starts, and it is exactly where the scope gap lives — finance specifies something the schema cannot hold, or the build produces something that will not reconcile. On these engagements there is no handoff. The same person reads the regulation, designs the table, writes the extract and ties it back to the trial balance.
Work runs directly with the finance director, or alongside your existing Sage partner where they hold the hosting and the upgrade path. I am not a reseller and I do not take partner margin. Prior client work is described by capability rather than by name or number, because it belongs to the clients who paid for it.
Start
Thirty minutes, and you will know whether you have a problem.
Run the exposure check first if you would rather find out without talking to anyone. Otherwise: your ERP version, your SQL Server version, and whether you import goods in CBAM scope. That is usually enough to say something useful on the first call.