SAP has enabled/mandated an army of people at my company who manage it and ruthlessly control even read access to it. The software is user-hostile, intentionally obscure, and all requests for slightly customized reports have to go through a multilayered approval process - often up to corporate - where it competes for funding against other survivors. Needing something custom invites constant questions of why the stand…
HR data is necessarily controlled though, there are pretty stingent controls in law around that. I understand the pain of not being able to report on stuff, but there is probably a sound reason. However, the delivery you describe sounds like a broken organisation tbh
It's almost its own industry. There are fleets of consultants charging ~$1000 a day just to install the system. Then, as the OP said, they charge by the hour for customised reports which means that businesses have to choose their report very carefully, and will probably need several more hours consulting when one aspect didn't work quite how they thought.
I would be surprised if the commenter here was someone who didn't already have access to the data. They are being frustrated by consultants who want to keep their billable hours up, and extraneously restricting access under guises such as "this person doesn't have enough training to touch the system," because it keeps them in paid work.
Source: Friend of mine. Man on the inside.