Sigma Computing: Offering the Optimal Intersection of Supply Chain Efficiency and Reliability

Could you shed some light on the Supply Chain Management Solutions that you offer on the basis of its methodology, features and benefits involved?

Just a few years ago, if you wanted to use data to drive business decisions, you followed a common set of steps: you’d find your data sources, build data pipelines, store that data, build data models so your analytics wouldn’t choke on the volume, and only then could you start analyzing. The cloud changed all that. There’s no longer a need to move your data around—now, it stays in the data warehouse. There’s no need to build complex data models—the performance of the modern cloud data warehouse reduces the need to pre-plan every question you might ask and reduce the amount of available data for roll-ups and subsets. On top of the power and scale benefits provided by the cloud itself, Sigma gives users a fast, easy, and flexible interface to all of that cloud data.

With Sigma, business people who aren’t necessarily “data experts” can work with huge volumes of data in a way with which they’re already familiar—spreadsheets and workbooks. They can perform pivots, lookups, column math and operations, and other tasks that would be slow and complicated in a business intelligence tool with little to no training inside Sigma. At the same time, data experts get a new way to work with the business. Instead of the old-fashioned “gather requirements - build - hope you got it right - rebuild it” cycle they’ve been forced to live with, they get to work collaboratively with business teams. The business can mock-up or prototype what they need; the data teams can validate and adjust where needed and even use the SQL code that Sigma creates—no requirement gathering, no guessing, no lag time from need to solution.

For supply chain teams, this means one thing: speed. These teams cannot afford to play the “here’s what I need, I hope it gets built right before the situation changes” game that’s been going on for years. They need to incorporate the latest data quickly and efficiently in order to get the right things to the right places at the right time as efficiently as possible. That can’t happen when it takes days to get data ready, a few more days to prepare the analysis, and yet a few more to get the supply chain management team upto- speed on what’s been built. Sigma kills all that lag time and shortens the time from the realization of a data need to the delivery of a data solution. One additional note: All of this can also be done with partners. We are entering a world in which planning will happen on live data, with full collaboration features and enterprise-grade security. Sigma not only enables the internal team but rather the entire supply chain.

What, according to you, are the distinct features of Sigma Computing /differentiating factors that give it a competitive edge?

We’re not a business intelligence solution!

Typically, BI systems are designed to allow business users to view dashboards with information on a select number of predefined performance indicators. That’s fine as long as your business is pretty static and doesn’t change much from day to day. But, increasingly, we’re seeing businesses operate in environments where the data, the risks and opportunities—and even the business models themselves—are changing fast. Traditional BI can’t keep up with this pace. It’s too complicated and time-consuming to build data pipelines to new sources, build data models, and make everything ready for consumption by the business. So instead, businesses tend to fall back on what they know and what they’re able to work with quickly and with flexibility—the spreadsheet. With spreadsheets, users aren’t limited in what they can do. They can track orders, but they can also add notes about what actions they’re taking to mitigate issues. They can create lists of gate times for ports around the world, but they can also easily enrich that list with port delay data as that information is known.

The only problem is that spreadsheets were designed for a time of limited data, not the modern era of massive data sets. Sigma, however, is like an infinitely flexible spreadsheet that was built for today’s massive cloud data sets. It lets users perform data analysis as they might in a traditional BI tool, but without all the drawbacks of those systems. It gives users the flexibility of the spreadsheets that they already know how to use while allowing them to analyze truly massive data right where it lives—in their data warehouse—without the need to move that data or perform cumbersome data modeling. It’s not BI, it’s not a spreadsheet. Sigma is a reimagining of the way business teams operate with data at the pace that today’s supply chain management leaders demand.