Organisations running SAP are consistently challenged to modernise their landscape, adopt cloud-first strategies, and maximise investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). I recently sat down with Lane Small, Product Manager for Query Manager at EPI-USE Labs, to discuss how clients' needs have changed over the years, and how a well-chosen reporting platform can serve as a foundational piece of a modern enterprise software strategy. This blog explores how EPI-USE Labs' Query Manager solution helps organisations running SAP modernise their landscape, support cloud journeys, and prepare for the age of AI.
SUMMARY: This blog explores how EPI-USE Labs' Query Manager solution helps organisations running SAP modernise their landscape, support cloud journeys, and prepare for the age of AI. It covers reporting continuity across hybrid-cloud environments, clean data and data health before migration, no-code reporting for business users, enterprise security and data governance, native connectors for business intelligence tools, customer co-innovation, embedded AI, and a proven track record built on many years of SAP HR expertise.
Organisations running SAP are consistently challenged to modernise their landscape, adopt cloud-first strategies, and maximise investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Yet technology is only as valuable as the data driving it and the people capable of accessing it.
I recently sat down with Lane Small, Product Manager for Query Manager at EPI-USE Labs, to discuss how clients' needs have changed over the years, and how a well-chosen reporting platform can serve as a foundational piece of a modern enterprise software strategy.
The HR and Payroll reporting landscape has shifted over the past decade. Where once a small team of technical SAP specialists controlled access to workforce data, today's organisations face a more complex picture: data dispersed across hybrid-cloud environments, a growing expectation that business users themselves should be able to run reports without IT involvement, tightening data governance requirements, and a 2027 deadline for SAP's traditional on-premise maintenance that is putting urgency behind migration plans.
At the same time, the rise of AI is changing what organisations expect from enterprise reporting; not just faster queries, but intelligent, conversational interfaces that make data accessible to anyone regardless of technical background. HR and Payroll leaders are being asked to do more with less, navigate increasingly fragmented system landscapes, and demonstrate the strategic value of their data.
Over the last two decades, EPI-USE Labs’ Query Manager solution has evolved from a technical tool into an accessible, intelligent platform designed to guide companies through their cloud journeys and into the age of AI.
What's the best way to navigate the cloud journey and SAP's 'clean core' philosophy?
As organisations shift their architectures from legacy on-premises landscapes to cloud ecosystems, reporting often remains a point of friction. Historically, reporting has been treated as an afterthought. Today, as companies navigate cloud environments, establishing unified reporting continues to be a challenge.
With SAP's traditional on-premise maintenance deadline set for 2027, businesses face pressing modernisation timelines. While organisations can choose to pay additional fees for extended maintenance, the eventual migration to modern environments is inevitable.
Regardless of an organisation's ultimate destination or pace, Query Manager is built to safeguard reporting continuity. Query Manager is certified and approved by SAP to operate across modern environments, including Employee Central Payroll (ECP) and setups via RISE with SAP – structural readiness that supports SAP's modern ‘clean core’ methodology.
We achieve this by leveraging the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), which allows companies to cleanly extract required employee data and pull information out of systems smoothly, even when specific customisations remain present in the landscape.
Modern corporate environments also feature disparate systems that do not naturally communicate with one another. A business might use SAP SuccessFactors as a cloud-based platform, while simultaneously running Employee Central Payroll (ECP) on the backend as a traditional SAP-type system. Query Manager solves this fragmentation by functioning as the central pipeline linking these environments together.
Lane visualises it as:
...the kind of string holding it together between it all and allowing you to do consolidated reporting between these disparate cloud systems.
By unifying data into a single source of truth, Query Manager enables organisations to run consolidated reports and seamlessly distribute clean data to their preferred business intelligence tools, such as SAP Datasphere and the broader business data cloud.
How can you ensure clean, accurate data when migrating to the cloud?
System modernisation provides an opportunity to audit internal business processes and data health. Moving to a sophisticated cloud framework is futile if you are feeding it corrupt, outdated, or fragmented legacy data.
As Lane puts it:
Whenever you're going into new systems, especially going clean core, I look at it as an opportunity to review business processes, to review data to ensure that the data I'm taking into my new system is good... You want to ensure that the data you're taking to the new system is the best it can be. So that way you're starting with fresh great data going in.
Query Manager acts as a data diagnostic tool during this transition. The software scans legacy configurations to highlight errors, trace anomalies, and isolate bad data before migration takes place.
We can help you find these discrepancies. We can help you find this bad data so that way you can clean it up before moving to your new system. So when you get into that new system, the processes are going to be much more efficient and cleaner when running.
By establishing this clean slate, anything an organisation runs in its new cloud system remains structurally sound, ensuring future reporting is accurate and free of legacy defects.
How can HR and Payroll teams run reports without SAP technical expertise?
A modernisation strategy must also account for shifting team roles within the business. Decades ago, creating meaningful Payroll or HR reports required specialised SAP technical skills. Query Manager has democratised this process, transitioning reporting away from restricted technical teams and placing it directly into the hands of business users.
With its no-code architecture, custom info types and tables can be integrated directly within the product without any technical expertise or ABAP programming; allowing non-technical business users to run strategic reports on demand, bypassing lengthy IT development queues.
This accessibility does not compromise enterprise security or data governance. In many legacy setups, business users resort to downloading information into local Excel or CSV files and manually combining data, creating security risks and compliance vulnerabilities. Query Manager removes this liability. When a business user triggers a report, the system keeps full SAP security authorisations intact; employees only see the data they are authorised to view.
For teams relying on downstream analytical platforms, Query Manager includes open, native connectors allowing organisations to push compliant data straight into Power BI, SAP Analytics Cloud, and Tableau.
Query Manager also recognises the practical needs of payroll and finance professionals who remain tied to Excel. Rather than forcing teams to abandon their preferred environment, a dedicated Excel Add-on enables payroll and finance specialists to pull their secure enterprise reports directly into Excel spreadsheets in real time; without ever needing to log into the main SAP backend system.
How does working directly with clients shape modern SAP reporting integrations?
An indicator of an enterprise vendor's reliability is how swiftly they adapt to market shifts. Platforms like Snowflake and Databricks have rapidly emerged as dominant data cloud systems. Two decades ago they were not on the horizon, but today they represent a core component of modern corporate data warehousing.
We address these architectural shifts through customer co-innovation rather than developing capabilities in isolation. With a global footprint of roughly 600 clients executing custom implementations, the development team explicitly avoids building features blindly:
The way we like to really do this is we don't want to just dive in and assume what our clients want... So when we get a client request that, hey, we're moving to Snowflake or Databricks, we say, let's meet up with you, let's talk about what you're doing, let's see your process and work with you to come up with a solution about how Query Manager can make this easier for you. We really like to develop it that way, versus developing with blinders on, because we may not hit that target with clients. So we like to get them involved early on.
By partnering directly with active client accounts early in the development cycle, the team eliminates the need to return to the drawing board to redevelop flawed integrations. When a solution is refined alongside one enterprise client, it successfully satisfies the deployment needs of the broader global user base.
What does the future of AI-driven SAP HR and Payroll reporting look like?
We are actively embedding artificial intelligence directly into the Query Manager platform. In its current iteration, Query Manager leverages embedded AI to automatically generate clear text overviews and descriptive summaries of existing data queries — so an employee can click on an unfamiliar query and instantly receive an AI-generated breakdown explaining exactly what it does and what data it draws.
Looking forward to the next five to ten years, advanced AI models and semantic layers are set to completely transform corporate reporting:
Historically, it's operational reporting. You know, I need this for this person. And it's going to become, as most things, probably more agentic or more chat friendly, where you describe what you're looking for. And it helps you build that out or helps you get to the results without even needing to know any of the details behind what you're even looking for.
To realise this future, we are constructing a comprehensive business semantic layer tailored for Query Manager. As team roles evolve alongside AI tools, employees will no longer need to navigate backend engineering technicalities or the underlying structures of disparate cloud systems. Users will simply state what business answer they need in plain language – and intelligent AI agents will handle the complexities, instantly delivering compliant results.
A track record built on over 20 years of SAP HR expertise
When selecting an enterprise reporting solution, companies look for a partner that balances innovation with a proven track record of stability. Query Manager has a history spanning more than 20 years and is trusted globally by close to 700 clients.
Lane Small, who joined EPI-USE Labs in 2016 before the launch of Query Manager 4, notes that this longevity stems from the platform's architectural vision:
The whole evolution of Query Manager is as times are changing, we build it on a platform so that way we can adapt with the times very quickly.
In earlier iterations, Query Manager operated much more like Microsoft Access, demanding a highly technical background. Users had to be SAP tech-savvy, with deep comprehension of database tables, and custom reporting frequently required writing ABAP code directly into the system. Query Manager 4 fundamentally transformed the platform. Over the past decade, it evolved from requiring deep ABAP expertise into a tool that empowers business users to independently report from custom infotypes and tables, integrate SuccessFactors and WorkForce Software data, connect to analytics solutions like SAP Analytics Cloud and Power BI, access reports directly in Excel, and view everything through a modern web browser - all without writing a single line of code. HR and Payroll professionals could finally own their reporting instead of waiting in IT queues.
Meet your modernisation goals
Whether your business is solving immediate reporting fragmentation across hybrid-cloud environments, cleaning legacy data ahead of a major migration, or striving to maximise user adoption via AI, Query Manager provides a reliable, time-tested foundation.
For a look into the technical capabilities and specific module options, visit https://www.epiuselabs.com/query-manager