Forrester TEI: Sigma Delivered 321% ROI and Payback in Under 6 Months

We just published a commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study on Sigma. If you have ever had to justify a BI decision internally, you know why this matters. People do not want “better dashboards.” They want something you can defend with numbers.

Forrester’s headline finding: 321% ROI over three years, with payback in under six months for a composite organization representative of interviewed customers.
That composite-org note is important. This is a commissioned study and Forrester is aggregating results across interviewed customers into a single model.

Forrester's Findings

ROI is the summary. The inputs are the useful part. The TEI page calls out a few drivers that are pretty straightforward:

• $2M in productivity gains from shifting work away from overextended data teams and into self-service.
• 49,400 end-user hours saved over three years, tied to Sigma being usable by the people who actually need the answers.
• $500K in legacy cost savings, plus a note that the composite org transitioned 95% of users to Sigma (which is usually where savings show up).
• Faster time to market: accelerating initiatives by three months, with $475K in new value attributed to that speed.

None of those are “feel good” metrics. They are operational: Less time waiting. Less time rebuilding the same thing. Less spend on overlapping tools.

Why the “hours saved” number matters

The 49,400 hours saved line is the one I keep coming back to. Most BI stacks are built around the idea that a small set of people will model everything, build everything, and distribute answers. That breaks the moment the business asks a slightly new question. Then it is tickets, backlogs, exports, and spreadsheet glue.

TEI studies are not perfect, but they tend to show the same pattern: if more people can work directly with governed data, the organization stops burning analyst cycles on repeat requests. The value is not just “self-service.” It is throughput.

The simplest way to read this study

If you are skimming, I’d do it in this order:

1. Start with the drivers (productivity, time saved, tool consolidation).
2. Ask yourself if those are problems you actually have. Most teams do.
3. Then look at the ROI summary, not the other way around.

If you want the full details, the report is available here.