About Responsive Analytix
Your systems capture everything and tell you almost nothing. I connect the data across job management, finance, HR and operations so you can see what’s actually happening in the business, and act on it.
What Responsive Analytix is
Responsive Analytix is an independent data consultancy, founded by David Laws in 2022 and based in Nottingham. I work with operationally complex businesses whose payroll, invoicing, planning and reporting depend on data held in job management, HR and finance systems that were never built to talk to each other. I connect those systems so the numbers hold up.
Connecting the sources is the part a system vendor cannot do for you, and it is the work I do as an independent data consultant. Each platform reports well enough on its own data. Almost none of them can tell you what is happening across the whole operation: the vans, the overtime, the jobs that are quietly losing money. That is where business intelligence actually starts.
I work with the systems you already have. No rip-and-replace, and no dashboards bolted on top of data no one trusts.
Who I work with
The businesses I work with look different from the outside and have the same problem underneath. They are operationally complex, they run on several systems that each hold part of the picture, and the joins between those systems are done by hand, by someone who has become the only person who understands them.
- Field service and engineering maintenance. Job management, timesheets, payroll and vehicle data that never meet. People get paid right, and invoices stand up when a client challenges them. Read the Linaker case study →
- Property. Portfolio performance held in one system, finance in another, with reporting rebuilt by hand every month. Read the G2M case study →
- Sports governing bodies. Membership, participation and funding data spread across systems, with reporting obligations that do not flex. Read the Paddle UK case study →
Typically £5m to £30m turnover, UK-wide, with enough operational scale to feel the problem and not enough internal data capacity to fix it.
Meet David Laws, independent data consultant
Hi, I’m David Laws. I’m an independent data consultant based in Nottingham and I founded Responsive Analytix in 2022.
I work with operations leaders, performance directors and finance leads in businesses running a job management or operational platform alongside separate payroll, HR and finance systems, with someone in the middle reconciling the three by hand.
I scope the problem, I design the approach, and I am accountable for the result. On most engagements I build it as well. Where a piece of work is bigger than one person, I bring in capacity I have chosen and worked with, and I stay across it. You are not handed to a delivery team you have never met.
My background is engineering and manufacturing operations before it was data. That is why I start with how a business actually runs rather than with the reporting layer sitting on top of it.
Why Responsive Analytix exists
I spent years inside data and reporting work, in manufacturing operations, energy, financial services, and a multi-client BI consultancy, and kept meeting the same problem. Organisations had data. Many had paid for platforms and dashboards. They still couldn’t trust the numbers, or act on them without hesitating.
It rarely came down to the technology. The data feeding it was disconnected, inconsistent, often keyed in by hand, and sometimes the rules the business ran on had never been written down anywhere. Putting a better dashboard on top of that doesn’t fix it. Automating dirty data just automates the errors.
Early in my data career I spent two years inside E.ON’s MI Centre of Excellence, the team whose entire job was reporting. It was running on more than seventy hand-maintained Excel reports and SQL scripts. Not because anyone was careless. Each one had been built for a real question by someone who needed an answer that week, and then it stayed. That is the pattern I keep finding. Poor reporting is rarely a technology failure. It is the accumulated cost of a hundred reasonable decisions nobody had time to undo.
What was missing was rarely another report. It was the connection between systems that nobody owned: the job data that never met the payroll data, the vehicle costs that sat apart from the jobs they belonged to. Until those meet, a leadership team can see what happened but not what is driving it, or which part of the business to act on.
I also saw the gap in who was available to fix it. A large consultancy is slow, generic and expensive for a business of this size. A junior contractor can execute but cannot always judge what is worth doing. What was missing was an independent data consultant senior enough to define the right approach, hands-on enough to build it, and small enough to stay close to the actual problem. That is what Responsive Analytix is.
My background
I started in engineering. A BEng in Engineering, Science and Technology at Loughborough, then the Advanced Course in Design, Manufacture and Management at Cambridge: a year built around short consultancy projects inside real manufacturing and process businesses, eight of them across the UK and Europe.
The decade that followed was production management. I ran shifts and then whole areas across food, soft drinks, pharmaceutical and consumer goods plants, with continuous improvement as the constant: OEE, downtime, waste and yield, non-conformances. At one point I ran a ready meals area producing 800,000 meals a week across thirteen lines, with 120 people on shift, accountable every Monday for the numbers that described it. Anyone who’s had to defend a figure they didn’t produce themselves learns quickly which numbers survive being questioned and which quietly fall apart. That instinct is what I brought into data, and it’s the thing a dashboard can’t give you.
I moved into data and reporting from there, through business intelligence and analyst roles across energy, financial services and hospitality, building the technical side on top of the operational grounding I already had. Then several years as a senior contractor and within a multi-client BI consultancy, delivering data warehouses and reporting for one business after another.
Seeing the same trust-in-data problem repeat across all of them is what prompted me to found Responsive Analytix in 2022.
Systems and organisations I’ve worked with
Systems I’ve extracted, cleaned and connected data from
Over my career I’ve integrated data from a wide range of operational and back-office systems, not just field service platforms. If your data lives in one of these, I’ve very likely worked with it before:
- Field service management: Joblogic, BigChange, simPRO
- HR: BambooHR, MoorePay
- Finance and ERP: NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 / Business Central, AccountsIQ, Sage, Sage Intacct, Iris
- Billing: Affinity, Zoey
- CRM and IT service management: Salesforce, ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics
- Contact centre, analytics and other: Genesys, Adobe, Zonal (EPOS), SAP, Business Objects
A few of the organisations I’ve delivered for
Recent Responsive Analytix engagements include Linaker (facilities management), Flow-Right Commercial Plumbing & Drainage (field service), G2M Group (property portfolio reporting), and Paddle UK / British Canoeing (national data strategy). Earlier consultancy work included named projects for Revolution Beauty and Linney.
Credentials
- Certification: Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP-600)
- Education: BEng (Hons) Engineering, Science and Technology, Loughborough University. Advanced Course in Design, Manufacture and Management (ACDMM), University of Cambridge.
A short personal note
Outside the work, I’m a keen runner and spend most of my time with my family. What I care about in the job is simple: plain answers over jargon, and honesty about what the data can and can’t tell you.
“David’s help was crucial in digitising part of our timesheet process, which freed up two full-time positions in our accounts team and increased our engineers’ productivity.”
Jennie Davies, Performance Director, Linaker
If your systems give you the headline numbers but can’t tell you what’s driving them, I connect the sources so you can make the decisions you couldn’t make before.
Curious what working together looks like? Read How I Work →