Item: Sigma Computing
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

My team uses Sigma to gain better access to our firm's internal datasets and to be less reliant on data engineers to produce reports and analyses for us. These reports have given the finance team faster and more flexible access to data that drives our external financial reporting, internal FP&A functions, regulatory reporting and responses, and in some cases have replaced manual processes that existed to facilitate operations.

Pros and Cons

Reduced learning curve compared to other products
User friendly interface
Very responsive support chat

Communicating errors and why they happen
Preventing users from performing functions that commonly cause errors
East coast support times

Return on Investment

Saved time
Improved documentation
improved self-service

Key Insights

Do you think Sigma Computing delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Sigma Computing's feature set?

Yes

Did Sigma Computing live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Sigma Computing go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Sigma Computing again?

Yes

Self-Service Analytics

Because everyone has better access to our tables/datasets and can easily grab what they need without having to go through an engineer with SQL knowledge or learning SQL themselves, people are overall more familiar with our data and further what exists/what is possible to do with it. As a result of this we are able to actually pull up workbooks or do a quick exploration of a dataset before making certain decisions, as well as provide workbooks to client facing decision makers.

Ad Hoc Analytics

Sigma is our main tool to do ad hoc analyses, especially when we have to drill down to source trade data to figure out where unexpected results are coming from. We can also look back into datasets to trace how we calculated a field rather than find the owner of a report and asking them to run through their script and see how they came up with their final numbers.

Alternatives Considered

Looker

We considered Looker when purchasing a BI tool, Looker seemed like it was less user friendly and support wouldn't be as responsive as Sigma.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Excel

Likelihood to Recommend

Sigma has been very easy to pick up and share with others, people catch on quickly because the calculated fields tool is very similar to Excel. I also have the ability to schedule exports to excel for those who do not want to use the platform.

Moving date filters have been tough for Sigma to handle with the nature of our datasets. We have daily ledgers that are only useful one day at a time (and bank dates only), but the preset dates filters are better suited for date ranges (i.e. the "last month" filter is 7/1/2022 to 7/31/2022, while we would just want 7/31/2022). We tend to need to get creative with our functions to get moving dates to work.

A User-friendly way to immediately begin automating manual processes

Overall Satisfaction with Sigma Computing