Client Success: Query Manager enables Cadent Gas to streamline HR SAP reporting

After the Pandemic hit and we had a team of offshore resource in India. So we had about 25 people who were doing lots of manual tasks, including reporting. We lost them overnight. So we went from having them creating our data and doing all the manual processes to they couldn't go into the office and we obviously have a secure network and how they would work. And because they couldn't go in because they were in a lockdown, we had to find ways and means of doing it. In the UK, we went from having five people offshore that were doing manual reporting, SE 16, those types of transactions, mashing lots of data together and sending it out manually in Excel, to having a tool where we had one person in the UK that could automate it all and then it obviously gets distributed automatically.

It just completely automates the solution for us. So especially when it comes to the Power Platform side of things, we can automate our data coming out of Query Manager into our Power Platform platform solution as a one-stop shop for the business. And also for sending out the notifications so the HR team don't need to, you know, type up different letters each time. We can just automate the process and send those out. One of them for me is kind of the ease of use. I think once somebody knows how to use it, it's quite transferable. It uses things like Excel formulas, so you don't necessarily have to be extremely technical to be able to use it. We're doing some quite clever stuff with Power Platforms around Power BI and Power Automate. So we've been able to link it in quite well and and, you know, get it to, give, like, a holistic view of our data across the organization. The amount of time that we've saved on our reporting: before we moved into using Query Manager, we had, over a hundred reports that were being run daily, weekly, monthly. We were still stitching those together manually, and bringing in Query Manager allowed us to completely automate that, send out our reports without even having to think about them. We can password protect all of our reports. Any letters that are going out, we quite often use, you know, identifying information to the employees so that when they receive a notification, it's something that only they know the password for.

Pandemic creates need for cost-effective, in-house
SAP HCM reporting solution

Cadent Gas, one of the UK’s largest utilities’ suppliers, has a big demand for HCM reporting and payroll automation. Until the pandemic, it relied on an offshore model. A team in India had managed all the back-office activities such as HR reporting, transactional HR tasks and running the payroll.

Due to the staffing shortages caused by the pandemic, Cadent Gas lost its overseas team overnight and was left without support. Normally, the team in India would have created over 200 HCM reports per month manually, but Cadent now needed to create them internally.

Query Manager with Document Builder allows automated
reporting and document creation

Cadent Gas began an onshoring project to streamline and automate SAP® reporting and payroll processes, handling everything in-house.

Using EPI-USE Labs’ Query Manager with Document Builder, HCM managers can create their own fully-customized reports independently. The solution can produce both standard and customized reports. This facility brings flexibility to operational reporting. Two further benefits are managing reports centrally and distributing the workload across more employees. In the offshore team, five people had created over 200 SAP reports manually per month using standard tools and Microsoft Excel. This new solution means that reports are automated, and one person can manage the process on a day-to-day basis.

SAP HR reports in Query Manager enabled
the HR Team to be more efficient

The HR team from Cadent Gas can now access data or build a custom transaction without involving an IT technician. This helps to optimize resources and reduces costs. Thanks to Query Manager with Document Builder, the barriers between technical and non-technical staff have been eliminated, instigating a more positive approach to data. The functional team can now access, audit and work with the data autonomously, making the whole process more agile and efficient.