Aryan Panangadan Dileep
2026 Saltire Scholar
ERP Research and Implementation Intern, Grease Monkey
Business Analysis and Technology with Business Law, University of Strathclyde
Hi there! My name is Aryan and I am a penultimate year student on the Business Analysis and Technology with Business Law programme at the University of Strathclyde. I applied to the Saltire Scholars Programme because I wanted an internship that would ask more of me than sitting on the sidelines of a business. Grease Monkey Infrastructure, a small active travel infrastructure company based in Livingston, offered exactly that kind of opportunity, and going in I was hoping to leave with a genuine understanding of how a business actually runs day to day, well beyond the models and frameworks I had spent two years studying in lecture theatres.
I joined Grease Monkey as an ERP Research and Implementation Intern, working directly under the company director as a business analyst and project coordinator for ERP implementation. Grease Monkey is a small team, and that meant I was not shadowing someone else's project. I was given ownership of large parts of it. My core focus was scoping and helping select the right implementation partner for a full ERP rollout that will eventually replace the company's legacy systems.
Over the course of the internship, I mapped current and future state business processes, built BPMN diagrams, wrote a formal RFP and vendor scope document, produced a fit gap analysis, and evaluated proposals from 5 shortlisted implementation partners, comparing cost, scope and delivery approach before presenting recommendations to the director. Alongside the ERP workstream I also contributed to a handful of other commercial projects at Grease Monkey that cannot be shared publicly yet, but which pushed me into areas of the business that I never expected an ERP intern to touch.
The clearest measure of impact is that the documentation I produced is the material the director is using right now to choose which partner will deliver a multi hundred thousand pound ERP implementation for the company. My work directly shaped the shortlist of vendors invited to quote, and my write ups of each vendor's response are what will inform the final decision. Knowing that a small business is going to build its future finance and operations system partly on the back of documents I wrote and diagrams I built is, honestly, the most rewarding part of the entire summer.
I also built real professional relationships in the process, not just with people inside Grease Monkey but with account managers and solution consultants, several of whom I corresponded with directly to clarify scope and pricing. Presenting my analysis to the director on a regular basis, and having him act on it, was the first time I felt treated as a genuine contributor to a business rather than a student on work experience.
The most valuable shift has been realising that my theoretical knowledge was never the finished product, it was the starting point. Concepts I had only ever applied to case studies, like fit gap analysis, requirements gathering and process re-engineering, turned into tools I used every week on a live commercial project with real budgets and real consequences. I was pulled into commercial and strategic conversations well outside a typical ERP intern's remit, which has genuinely broadened what I think I am capable of doing in a career. If you had asked me before this summer whether I could scope and help select an ERP vendor for a live business, I would have said that sounded like a job for someone years into their career, not a student. I am proud that it turned out not to be true.
To any student considering applying to the Saltire Scholars Programme, my advice is simple: choose an internship where you might feel slightly out of your depth. That discomfort is exactly where the growth happens. I would recommend this programme without hesitation, because it does not place you somewhere to observe, it places you somewhere to contribute, and the difference between those two experiences is enormous.
