Two different starting questions
A business analyst typically starts with the question: "What does the business need?" An Odoo consultant typically starts with: "How can Odoo support that need?" In practice, both questions have to be asked together, which is why the two roles overlap so often — especially on smaller engagements where one person handles both.
The business analyst's lens
Business analysis is about understanding processes independently of any specific tool. It involves requirements gathering, process mapping, and writing functional specifications that describe what the solution needs to accomplish — regardless of the platform used to build it.
The Odoo consultant's lens
An Odoo consultant translates those functional specifications into a working configuration: modules, workflows, automations, access rights. This role requires deep familiarity with what Odoo can and cannot do out of the box, and where customization is genuinely necessary versus where a process should adapt to the tool instead.
Why the overlap is useful
When the same person holds both perspectives, translation loss is minimized. A pure business analyst might design an ideal process that Odoo can't easily support. A pure Odoo consultant might configure something technically correct that doesn't match how the business actually operates. Holding both lenses at once means the functional specification and the technical configuration stay grounded in the same reality.
In practice
On most of the engagements I've worked on, this overlap isn't a luxury — it's a necessity. Smaller businesses rarely have separate budgets for a dedicated business analyst and a separate ERP consultant. Being able to move fluently between "what does the business need" and "how do we configure that in Odoo" is what makes the implementation practical rather than theoretical.