Insight - An Overview

Insight – An Overview

The Insight View in Sigma is a tool that allows you to sort and filter the information in your estimate so that you can focus on a particular component, or a subset of components. Summarizing your estimate in different ways helps to understand where the costs are, and aids in making the numbers transparent and easy to understand for your colleagues or your client. Insight Views can also be used to export specific data from your estimate to excel, or MS Project, etc.

Insights Views group numbers from the estimate based on the setup and use of fields such as category, text, heading, location, phase, vendor, etc. Custom fields, which are unlimited in Sigma, can be included in Insight Views, and can be used as the primary sort or filter, or as a subsidiary sort or filter.

For instance, most estimators prefer to work in a CSI format to organize the WBS, but owners and clients (and sometimes bosses) want to see the estimate organized in a Uniformat WBS. This can easily be done in an Insight View. Or you might want to see all the material for Division 3 work, and then the material broken down by work item. No problem.

While the Insight View tab is available in Sigma Enterprise, Professional and Personal, only the Enterprise version includes the Insight Designer, which is the focus of this guide.

To access the Insight Designer

Go to the Insight tab in the estimating window and click on the Insight Designer button in the toolbar.
Click on Add when the window opens. The Insight Designer window has 3 tabs: General, Content and Advanced; and the lower portion of the window is a preview of what the Insight View will look like.

GENERAL TAB

On the General tab you can name the view you are creating, add a description, and decide if you want the description to be displayed in the view.

CONTENT TAB

This is where the fun starts. It is in the Content tab that you create the hierarchy for the sorting of your estimate. The hierarchy can use any custom field (column), any text based column or heading, bookmark or completed indicator to sort your estimate. So, if you have a custom column for Phase and Area, you could sort by Phase, then under each Phase could be the Area of the work. At each level of the hierarchy, you select which columns to include in the view, or you can assign columns at the top item, and lock those columns for all lower levels.

For this guide, I am using an estimate called Rudd Children’s Home, which can be downloaded here (and I recommend you download it so you can follow along in your Sigma) and in this estimate, I have custom columns for the following: Phase, Area and Uniformat Levels 1 and 2. We are going to create an Insight View that sorts the estimate by Phase and then by Area.

Click on Add in the Content tab and you’ll see this:

Heading has been automatically entered as the uppermost sort, so we need to change that.

Click once on Heading and you’ll see a drop-down arrow on the right side of the field.
Click the drop-down arrow, scroll down and select Phase.
Tab over to the next field, Type, and click once to get the drop-down arrow, and select Grouped by content of Phase.
Next click on Columns and select All in the Select Group box, then select the following columns: Cost with Overhead, Overhead, Profit, Sales Price, Total Cost. At the bottom of the columns window, click the box at Apply to all levels. That will ensure that those columns are used at every level of the Insight View.
Click Refresh for a preview of the structure

And you’ll see this:

Now we are going to add a level to the view to add the Area – a level that will be a child of Phase and will sort each Phase by the areas in it. In the Content tab:

Click Add and again the default selection, Heading, will be added.
Click on Heading, and select Area from the drop down list
In the Type column, again click and activate the drop-down list and select Grouped by content of Area.

And you’ll see this:

If you want to see which Phases are in which Areas, simply click on Areas and click Move up, click on Refresh, and you’ll see this:

Click on Phase and move it up to the top again.

Let’s add a third level (there is no limit to the number of levels you can sort by – it’s limited only by the information in your estimate). We want to see the totals for each of our WBS headings, for each Area, sorted by Phase.

Click Add and again the default selection, Heading, will be added.
Since Heading is what we want, in the Type column, click and activate the drop-down list and select Level 1 since that is the location of our main WBS headings.

And you’ll see this:

Some explanation of the choices under the Type drop down is in order:

“Grouped by content of (Sigma Column Name)” - Components can be grouped by content of any Sigma column, custom or default. For example, Category, Operation, Unit, Note, Currency, Production Unit, or even by Bookmark or Marked Completed.

“Components grouped by text field” - each group split into types by text field

“Components specified” - each type split into individual components