Item: Sigma Computing
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Sigma Computing

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The team I am on, has a small headcount for the number of clients we're supporting. Sigma has helped us massively reduce the amount of time it takes for us to compile reports and actionable business intelligence from dozens of hours a week down to 1-3 hours. Moreover, it's helped us in supporting our sales reps with information on their specific clients. The scope of use for our team has only continued to grow as other teams realize use cases based on what I've built so far for my team.

On a daily basis, use it to determine a broad range of things:

Product performance:

Observing past trends and predict future trends in product usage
Identify broad trends that could lead to product improvements
Help clients get the maximum potential from our product by observing how its being used
Identify areas where costs to us, or the client, may be unnecessarily high and address

Operations/Customer service:

Proactively identify issues and reach out to clients for troubleshooting and resolution
Reach out to clients who are not using the product to its maximum potential and assist in helping their projects succeed
Maximize delivery to our clients by identifying the causes of shortfalls

Pros and Cons

Pros

Customer Support: They've always been very quick to respond, willing to help work to come up with solutions for anything I'm stuck on.
Very quick and easy to create reports with, once a solid dataset has been built.
Low Code/No Code UX is intuitive to any excel users.
Many options for joining different data sources.
Adding new features regularly

Cons

Formatting: On workbooks and dashboards, it can sometimes be difficult to make the page elements align correctly.
When creating and setting up datasets, having a temporarily row-limiting option when editing would help a lot, particularly on anything with a large number of rows.
Scheduling reports to be sent out can be tricky if the request is something like "Last Monday of each month".
Being able to export an xls with conditional formatting would be helpful in some cases.

Return on Investment

Easy to spin up a new ad-hoc report or dashboard
Recovered a lot of revenue that had previously not been invoiced or noticed.
Improved customer service by allowing us to proactively notice issues and correct them for clients.
Decreased time and error rate when by switching to Sigma vs compiling reports in spreadsheets
Building parameters to identify common or key issues has greatly helped us maximize delivery to clients

Key Insights

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

Not sure

Are you happy with Sigma Computing's feature set?

Yes

Did Sigma Computing live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Sigma Computing go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Sigma Computing again?

Yes

Alternatives Considered

Google Data Studio, Tableau Desktop and QlikView

Google Data Studio is free, intuitive and easy to use but the analytics are limited. In-table calculations can't be done easily and it lacks a native connector for Snowflake. Moreover, table columns cannot be arranged in any order--they must be dimension first, and metrics second. Tableau is powerful and makes visually compelling reports, but the learning curve is extremely steep if one isn't already familiar with existing data visualization or business intelligence platforms. In our case, it's not connected to our data source, and importing/joining data requires a fair bit of setup as well. Qlik is very fast and powerful, but very few people on our teams have seats on the platform.

Other Software Used

Looker Studio

Likelihood to Recommend

Some of the specific scenarios where Sigma has really helped us are in our regular weekly reports and in proactive issue detection. Using Sigma has reduced the amount of time spent on them from 6-8 man-hours per week down to 2 hours, and only because some reporting relies on sources outside of Sigma. We've been able to use it to quickly and proactively detect issues based on KPIs and metrics, as prior to Sigma, we had to download a query result and analyze it in a spreadsheet.

The scenarios where Sigma is less appropriate are when a task needs to be confirmed. If we reach out to a client regarding an issue, we can't indicate it was done in Sigma. I don't consider this a Sigma issue, as it's not meant to be a workflow tool.

Sigma Feature Ratings

Using Sigma Computing

Users and Roles

150 - Currently we're onboarding additional users onto Sigma so our usage count continues to grow.

Currently the business functions represented are decision-makers, operations teams across several product divisions, sales, supplier relations and quality management teams.

Support Headcount Required

5 - Currently all of our usage is in-house and spread across several teams in an ongoing basis. The Business Intelligence team manages the administrative aspect of Sigma as well as the data connections. There are a few members who are not part of the BI team create the needed reports and dashboards for their respective teams' usage. The skills required are generally a knowledge of how spreadsheets work, and our BI team grants editing permissions on request, as we don't explicitly limit who can support our use of Sigma

Business Processes Supported

Streamlining customer service by proactively identifying issues and reaching out to client
Real-time and accurate financial reporting
Identifying client trends and addressing as needed

Innovative Uses

Bringing in CRM data from another platform to monitor their team's workloads
Creating parameters to help us respond to project setups that specifically require our team's intervention
Reduce the amount of revenue loss by creating a "Quality" report that allows the viewer to set specific KPIs and identify projects that are at high risk
Creating a specific dashboard with selectable parameters that help our support team quickly identify projects that may have issues and proactively reach out to the client

Future Planned Uses

Bring in additional data from other financial reporting and CRM platforms to create higher level reports
Merge the data with operational data for more granular observation of trends

Likelihood to Renew

Sigma has helped us a lot and has become an integral part of our daily workflow. It would be difficult to switch to another platform and have to rebuild the numerous metrics and performance reports that we have already established

Evaluating Sigma and Competitors

Products Replaced

Yes - Sigma primarily replaced an in-house reporting system that was over a decade old. The previous system simply created a CSV file of the results of an SQL query and it was up to users to parse the data so it was unable to report in real-time. The replacement was due to ease-of-use, as well as to reduce the turnaround time for generating reports. Previously, the business intelligence was responsible for custom queries on specific reports, which could take several days of back and forth to set up.

Key Differentiators

Other

I was not involved in the purchase of Sigma Computing

Evaluation Lessons Learned

If it had to be done again, I'd likely dig more in depth as to how data can be connected and how much (or little) coding could be used, as well as evaluating the speed and performance to end users, of each of the prospective platforms.

Sigma Implementation

Implementation Rating

Was not involved in implementation

Implementation Details / Implementation Partner

Implemented in-house

Change Management Lessons

Not sure - I was not involved in implementation

Implementation Issues

Not involved in implementation

Sigma Support

Sigma Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Premium Support

I'm not sure if my license includes Premium Support, but I have never had trouble getting help with any issues thus far. The support staff are friendly, knowledgeable and tolerate my very basic questions. They have also submitted feature requests on my behalf

Bug Resolution

Exceptional Examples of Sigma Support

There was a case when I was attempting to put together a specific report when I ran into an issue on how to perform some of the calculations and format the report. I reached out via the support chat feature and described my issue. The support person offered to immediately jump on a Zoom screen share with me and help me work through my use case and issue, and helped me resolve it. I consider it an exceptional example of the support I've received thus far, because it felt like they were committed to helping without hesitation

Support Rating

Every time I've used the support chat, I get an answer in a few minutes and they always have helped me with an issue regardless of whether or not it's a Sigma issue or a user issue (ie. me). I never felt like they were beyond answering my basic questions about various functions or how to use them

Using Sigma

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

Easily creating in-table calculations and pivot tables
Using parameters to create "filters" based on specific metrics or KPI

Difficult Tasks

Date calculations involving the number of days from the beginning of the year or month (I think this is the case for any similar platform)
Formatting pie chart legends
Certain types of if-then statements that involve multiple parameters

Usability

As someone with no experience in Business Intelligence tools, but with moderate experience with spreadsheets, Sigma was a very easy transition. I've found it very straightforward and usable, especially compared to other tools which may require custom coding, or have a steep learning curve. Many of the functions are familiar to both people familiar with SQL and with spreadsheets

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