Drive Your Business Forward with Sigma’s Embedded Analytics
Your organization may have a wealth of data, but how do you get the most relevant data to the right users at the right time so they can make informed, proactive, decisions that drive your business forward? Embedded analytics is the answer — it empowers your users with valuable forecasting and insights directly within the applications they already use to streamline their decision-making process.
A robust business intelligence (BI) tool that supports embedded analytics is easy to set up and delivers insights at lightning speed while maintaining robust user-backed security to ensure data privacy. With embedded analytics at your fingertips, you can make data-driven decisions quicker and intelligently within your existing workflows.
To demonstrate the power of embedded analytics, we’ll share how we partnered with Sigma Computing, to develop an embedded application. This application combines Sigma’s user-backed embedding and visualization capabilities with Snowflake’s scalable computing to process large volumes of data and provide insights and forecasts based on complex forecasting models.
Our Embedded Analytics Application for brooksgrocery.org
We developed our embedded application for a fictitious organization: Brook’s Unique Goods, an Ecommerce company specializing in groceries. However, their regional and department managers lacked visibility into their online sales and the results of their marketing efforts, so they needed a centralized place to understand customer segments.
We conducted a comprehensive discovery process to identify the pain points faced by these regional and department managers. Their challenges inspired us to create a web application with embedded Sigma dashboards. The application leverages sales data and predictive analytics to optimize marketing strategies and maximize sales impact while staying within budgetary constraints.
Functionality Highlights
Our embedded application leverages several Sigma platform functionalities and its embedding capability. Sigma's intuitive interface makes the process user-friendly, allowing you to focus on crafting impactful insights, while it handles the complexity of the large volume of data, embedding, and row-level security. Here’s more about what it can do.
- Sigma Visualizations: You can build visualizations within Sigma, which helps them look professional and allows quick iteration. Sigma’s dashboards prioritize accessibility with high-contrast modules for easy interpretation.
- Database Writeback: Using Sigma‘s native feature to write back to the cloud warehouse, you can input scenario planning parameters. This functionality allows non-technical users to interact with the data uniquely while maintaining a clean data pipeline.
- Intelligent Forecasting: Your historical company data can train a predictive model to provide revenue forecasts for scenario planning of marketing efforts.
- Real-Time Predictions: Sigma retrieves predictions from the model hosted in Snowflake in real-time and you can instantly see the predicted impact of hypothetical data.
- I-frame Embedding: You can interact with Sigma directly from our web application creating an integrated, interactive experience.
- Row Level Security: Users with different access levels can only see the data they need to perform their job functions while protecting sensitive information.
How Embedded Analytics Can Help
Embedded analytics empowers users across various departments and industries.
- Sales: Provides instant insights into your sales performance, helping you prioritize leads, optimize pricing, and close deals faster.
- Finance: Transforms your financial dashboards, enabling data-driven decisions about budgets, investments, and resource allocation.
- Marketing: Leverages embedded analytics within customer relationship management (CRM) platforms to understand your customer segments in real-time, monitor campaigns, and aid in planning and forecasting, as seen in our example.
How Our Application Works
Users authenticate into the web portal with their email and passwords. Our application uses user credentials to determine access levels and sends this information to Sigma. Then Sigma applies the necessary row-level security to Snowflake data, updates the visualizations and metrics, and returns the dashboards to the web app.
When you leverage the forecasting tool you write your inputs directly into the Sigma embedded dashboard, Sigma calls a Snowflake user-defined function (UDF) which runs the model and returns the prediction.
How Our Application is Built
The web app is built with NextJS, Next Auth, and Radix UI. The backend integration only requires a post handler to generate the Sigma-secured embed URL from a set of secrets and parameters. This site runs on NextJS, which uses Node JS underneath the hood, but you can create this API endpoint with any language or framework you choose. Read more about backend integration in Sigma‘s documentation, which has code examples.
The embed application is a React Component that fetches a secure URL, sets the value onto an iframe, and listens for events from the embed. The component accepts a view type as a prop to know which secure embed URL to generate for the logged-in user.
For more details on the web app architecture please check out our reference architecture.
Our Application’s Security
Brook‘s Unique Goods wants to restrict data access to the appropriate teams and ensure that users have the necessary access to perform their job functions while protecting sensitive information. To access the system, you authenticate with your username and password, and then two layers of security are applied.
- Row-Level Security: This is enforced by Sigma and ensures that you can only access data you’re authorized to see based on your roles and privileges.
- Page Availability: This is enforced by the web app. Access to the forecasting page is restricted to certain users only.
Four core teams at Brook‘s Unique Goods need access to our embedded application. The regional team, the products team, the general managers, and the administrators. Each of these teams has a unique set of permissions and restrictions. Read more on our personas and use cases page.
Our Application in Action
Imagine yourself as a team member at Brook’s Unique Goods with access to our embedded analytics. Here’s how they would provide insights and assist you with forecasting.
Insights
The first page of our application is the Customer 360 Overview, where you can see the business's Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in areas like acquisition, growth, and retention. Additionally, it contains a table that provides detailed information about the most recent purchases.
From here, you could further examine each of these areas in more detail by using the navigation and gain valuable insights and context that you can use to make business decisions.
On each detail page, there are filters to provide a more nuanced view of the metrics.
Forecasting
When you decide how to allocate your advertising budget to increase sales, it can be helpful to see visual representations of the forecasted impact on sales. Our tool enables you to input your budget and see real-time adjustments to the visualizations that reflect the forecasted revenue that will be generated because of that investment. This allows you to make informed decisions based on the projected impact of your spending.
In the following animation, you can see how the forecast visualizations update in real time based on your input.
See a Full Demo
How We Can Help Your Organization Leverage Sigma’s Embedded Analytics
Putting together this application for a fictional company was an exciting process that taught us a lot about how the information it provides can help in a real-world context. We learned a lot about the power of Sigma Computing’s embedded analytics, and how they can be combined with Snowflake’s scalable computing to process large volumes of data and provide valuable insights and forecasts to drive decision-making.
To learn more about how our application can help you, we encourage you to try it at brooksgrocery.org (Password: any phrase). Then feel free to reach out to us with any questions or to discuss how we can create a custom application like this to empower your organization with the data it needs to succeed. In our discussion, we can form an estimate for you of the time and budget required to build and implement this kind of application for your specific organization.