Sigma: As easy to use as Excel, as powerful as Tableau.
Updated January 04, 2023
Sigma: As easy to use as Excel, as powerful as Tableau.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sigma Computing
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:
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
- 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
- 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
- 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.
- 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
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
Prior to implementing Sigma, we were downloading query results and analyzing them in a spreadsheet, which was time-consuming and error-prone. Sigma has sped up this process significantly and increased the quality and consistency of the reports by automating the process.
This helps us inform stakeholders and decision-makers on business decisions and client discussions.
For example, we've been tracking how a recent business decision has been impacting revenue by creating a new report in Sigma that we can monitor continuously and see how our clients have responded to the change, and the impact on revenue and quality of deliveries. There have been many instances where a stakeholder or decision maker has requested specific information, and Sigma has allowed us to turn around the report within an hour vs a day or two using our previous methods
This helps us inform stakeholders and decision-makers on business decisions and client discussions.
For example, we've been tracking how a recent business decision has been impacting revenue by creating a new report in Sigma that we can monitor continuously and see how our clients have responded to the change, and the impact on revenue and quality of deliveries. There have been many instances where a stakeholder or decision maker has requested specific information, and Sigma has allowed us to turn around the report within an hour vs a day or two using our previous methods
Sigma has made a positive impact on our ability to conduct iterative ad-hoc analyses by making it quick and easy to create new reports when one is requested, or thought of. If the report identifies a continuing trend, it's trivial to convert it to an ongoing report or dashboard to track the impact of decisions and steer the course of those changes if any are needed.
- 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.
Sigma Feature Ratings
Using Sigma Computing
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.
Currently the business functions represented are decision-makers, operations teams across several product divisions, sales, supplier relations and quality management teams.
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
- 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
- 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
- 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
Evaluating Sigma and Competitors
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.
- Other
I was not involved in the purchase of Sigma Computing
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
- Implemented in-house
Not sure - I was not involved in implementation
- Not involved in implementation
Sigma Support
| 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 |
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
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
Using Sigma
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Familiar | None |
- Easily creating in-table calculations and pivot tables
- Using parameters to create "filters" based on specific metrics or KPI
- 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