F1000 Logistics Real Estate Leader Turns to Sigma to Ensure Compliance

In 2020, 6.3% of the U.S.’s GDP flowed through warehouses owned by this logistics leader, earning the company $4.4B in revenue and generating a lot of data. The company’s general ledger (GL) alone has more than 500 million rows of data .

The accounting team is responsible for conducting bad debt ratio analysis each week and ensuring the company remains in compliance, but Tableau would repeatedly crash when the team tried to filter the GL due to scale limitations, causing the report to take more than two hours to run . The team also needed simultaneous access to the transaction level data, but was unable to use Tableau so data had to be extracted from Snowflake and put into multiple Excel worksheets for analysis. In short:

• Tableau’s scale limitations and poor performance against Snowflake delayed the creation of a weekly report that was necessary for the accounting team to complete their compliance reviews.
• The data team had to extract data from Snowflake and into Excel for the accounting team to analyze, opening the company up to version control issues, security risks, and compliance concerns .
• The company estimated that the wasted time and resources was costing them between $2.4M and $3.6M per year .

With Sigma, the accounting team now has a dashboard that shows the financial position of local books, allowing them to monitor issues in real time, review transactions, and share insights with other teams for follow-up.

Direct access to Snowflake

Sigma was purpose-built for Snowflake and cloud data warehouses. The accounting team now has direct access to live, governed data in Snowflake, ensuring that everyone is always working with the same current data - no more risky, stale extracts, data sprawl, or conflicting insights – and the data stays safe in Snowflake.

Unlimited scale and speed

Sigma is a cloud-native solution delivering unlimited scale at cloud speed – no summaries or aggregates necessary. The GL report the accounting team depends on takes just two minutes in Sigma and they are able to easily take a snapshot of every transaction across the whole company on any given date and time.

Self-service data exploration

Sigma’s spreadsheet interface makes iterative data exploration accessible to anyone, especially those that are accustomed to analyzing data in spreadsheets. Today, the accounting team can easily analyze millions of rows of transaction data and quickly address potential compliance issues before they become serious problems.

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