Sigga and the surprisingly expensive trip to the printer

At Ambev, even the maintenance software needed maintenance. The brewer’s internally developed mobile maintenance application had become unstable and inadequate, according to Sigga’s account of the project. Ambev considered building another. That is a wonderfully revealing predicament: a company had given its maintenance people a tool, and now the tool itself needed replacing.

The replacement search produced 26 technical requirements. Sigga’s published account says the selected ready-made solution covered 90% of them and eventually reached 4,000 users across the manufacturer’s sites in Brazil. The interesting detail is the requirements list. This was a buyer with a memory. Having lived with an application that disappointed it, the maintenance department knew what to ask for.

Sigga occupies this unglamorous but consequential corner of enterprise software. A factory may have its assets, maintenance history, and orders in SAP. Yet the actual job can still travel through a spreadsheet, a printer, a supervisor’s desk, and somebody’s recollection. Each stop offers another opportunity for delay. A computer system can be comprehensive while the working day remains absurd.

01 / The distance between a record and a repair

Enterprise asset management, usually shortened to EAM, concerns the physical things a business depends on: equipment that must be inspected, serviced, repaired, and documented. Sigga develops software for the people managing that work, particularly in SAP environments. Its buyers are businesses with substantial industrial assets. Public customer materials name BRF, Ingredion, Saint-Gobain, Bunge, Petrobras, and AB InBev, among others.

That customer mix helps explain the product. Food plants, chemical operations, utilities, and energy facilities have different equipment, but maintenance still requires coordination. Someone must describe the problem. Someone must determine its priority. Someone must find the part and assign a qualified person. The work then has to fit a production window. Afterwards, someone must record what happened, preferably before the details become folklore.

Sigga EAM Empower puts work orders and related information on a mobile device. Technicians can record measurements, capture job duration, reserve materials, create notifications, and attach evidence. The app supports offline work and synchronizes when a connection returns. That last capability deserves attention: a workflow designed for field work cannot assume that the field has reliable Wi-Fi.

The company's Planning & Scheduling product addresses the upstream problem. It helps planners examine capacity, materials, skills, backlog, and downtime windows, then adjust the schedule. Mobile Warehouse & Inventory extends the same practical idea to SAP warehouse, inventory, and quality-management workflows. The common thread is fewer separate administrative journeys around a single physical task.

02 / The Saturday that scheduling swallowed

Ingredion gives the scheduling argument a useful shape. Sigga’s case-study page reports that planning and scheduling fell from two days to two hours, while technician wrench time increased by 25%. Wrench time means time spent doing maintenance work. A gain there suggests that something around the job, rather than the technician’s ability to do it, was consuming the day.

The accompanying account describes a maintenance culture accustomed to reacting to breakdowns. Its reliability leader started with planning and scheduling, aiming to demonstrate the benefit of preventive work before adding technician mobility. The sequence matters. People were being asked to change their routines, and an early operational result gave them a reason to believe the change was useful.

For a manager elsewhere, the copyable idea is the order of operations. Pick a bottleneck people recognize. Measure the time it consumes. Improve that process and let the result become the argument for the next change. A grand transformation programme may be harder to defend than a Saturday handed back to the planner.

“Keeping a humanistic intent in what it is that we create, rather than just driving profit.”STEPHEN TIMMS / THEN SIGGA CEO / 2022 INTERVIEW

03 / A different form should not need a new project

Sigga’s other distinguishing pitch is configurability. Its Empower platform includes no-code tools for adapting applications and workflows. The promise is attractive to maintenance teams because procedures change. A plant may need an extra question, an inspection may require a photograph, or an audit may expose a gap. Each small improvement becomes harder to make if it must wait for a bespoke development project.

In May 2026, Sigga described Empower Forms in detail: configurable fields, required answers, conditional rules, attachments, signatures, versions, and PDF outputs. These are modest features with serious uses. A compulsory field can prevent an incomplete record; a conditional question can ask for more evidence only when an abnormal condition is reported. Better data begins with asking a useful question at the useful moment.

Location is another example. A June 2024 Empower enhancement introduced GPS-based sorting, maps, navigation, and position-and-duration recording. For assets spread across a large site or service territory, knowing which job is nearby can be as practical as knowing which job is urgent. Neither function repairs the equipment. Both can improve the circumstances in which a person reaches it.

04 / What the licence buys - and what it asks of you

Sigga sells enterprise software and associated implementation and support. Its public SAP listing for Planning & Scheduling shows an annual price of $1,350 per user licence and a $50,000 setup fee, with a one-year minimum. The licensing description counts deployed maintenance technicians; contractors are excluded. Those are listing terms for that product, rather than a price for the entire Sigga portfolio or a particular customer project.

Procurement therefore needs a defined scope. Which sites and technicians are included? Which workflows need configuration? What training, devices, support, and integration work belong in the proposal? Sigga’s published Safe Passage programme also describes a migration offer covering installation, configuration, and train-the-trainer services. An offer and a marketplace listing can have different conditions; the contract needs to settle them.

The competitive field includes Prometheus Group in maintenance planning and scheduling and Innovapptive in mobile maintenance. Both publish SAP-related capabilities. Sigga’s case rests on the combination of SAP integration, mobile execution, planning, and configurable workflows. Buyers should test that combination against their actual work orders, permissions, parts checks, and offline routines. A feature list becomes meaningful when a technician can finish the job with it.

The fit is strongest where SAP already anchors maintenance operations and manual handoffs consume measurable time. The same logic makes the fit weaker where there is no relevant SAP estate, little planning complexity, or no commitment to consistent records. No-code editing still requires someone to decide the correct process. Software cannot supply a missing spare part or persuade an organisation to take preventive work seriously on its own.

05 / A consulting business learns to travel

Sigga began in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 2001. Its SAP partner profile describes an origin in professional consulting for SAP and EAM, followed by the adoption of mobile technology. It is a plausible explanation for the company's attention to workflow: the product grew out of the business of getting enterprise systems to work for industrial customers.

THE COMPANY TODAYRohan BairatSigga’s current leadership page names Bairat as CEO and founder Warley Borges as board chairman. Portrait published by Sigga.

The company announced a Brisbane APAC headquarters in 2020. In January 2021, Gemspring Capital announced a strategic investment intended to support geographic expansion and product development. Today Sigga lists Houston as its global headquarters and reports more than 100,000 active users across its solutions. Its stated values include accountability and customer orientation; in this market, continued adoption is a useful place to look for evidence of both.

There is a pleasingly ordinary lesson underneath the industrial vocabulary. Follow one maintenance order from creation to closure. Count the waits, copies, walks, and missing details. Sigga’s business lives in those intervals. The machine matters, of course. So does everything that prevents the person beside it from getting on with the repair.