[sims] Which MIS??

[dbishop866]

Good afternoon all,

 

Just wanted to grasp some veiws of people - we currently use SIMs for our MIS but the cost of running it is seen as extortionate by some of our SLT and for me to investigate other alternatives?

 

On looking around there doesnt seem to be massive amounts of other companies that supply MIS alternatives - I looked at Bromcom which seems to cover all areas that are needed but do they do it well?? Also i read a fair bit that there is rumour that they are have financial troubles - does anyone know if there is any substance to this and would reconmend Bromcom?

 

Thanks,

 

DB.

[Max_Power]

There are a large number of MIS systems on the market, with some in particular being aimed at independent schools as opposed to state sector.

 

DfE use the IMLS framework which details lots of different MIS systems.

 

Information Management and Learning Services | Crown Commercial Service

 

Independent School focused products dont appear on this list though, such as iSAMS

[pcstru]

On looking around there doesnt seem to be massive amounts of other companies that supply MIS alternatives - I looked at Bromcom which seems to cover all areas that are needed but do they do it well??

We went through a quite extensive MIS selection process over the course of a year and the decision to go with Bromcom was pretty unanimous. The only dissent was based on the risks of a smaller supplier and the larger community with SIMS, rather than on functionality and useability. We aren't live with it yet but it's not keeping me awake at night... yet!

 

Also i read a fair bit that there is rumour that they are have financial troubles - does anyone know if there is any substance to this and would reconmend Bromcom?.

Can you provide some links or references to where you read this? We looked at their financials - not bang up to date but recent enough and they seemed to be in reasonable enough shape. They aren't exactly a new company - they have locked horns with Capita (SIMS) in the distant past over (ISTR) wireless registration and via the OFT about 3rd party access to SIMS data. It would surprise me somewhat if they were in trouble.

[elsiegee40]

Much also depends on what type of school you are and what features you need. Is your school independent or a state school. Is it part of a Multi Academy Trust? Is it primary or secondary ... or neither?

[dbishop866]

Can you provide some links or references to where you read this?

Thanks, it wasn't something I read it was information gathered by our business manager. When she attended the Schools Business Managers Conference in February it was discussed that SIMS seemed to be breaking at the seams with all the different add ons and that schools needed to think about building in to their budgets the change in MIS systems as capita seem quite rigid with the development of SIMS. Hence why we are looking at other options. As a part of the discussion bromcom was brought up and it was the veiw of a number of business managers who had experience with bromcom that there was a financial issue and that bromcom along with others are struggling to compete with SIMS which seemed unrivalled and that there were no other reasonable competition to capita...

 

We're a new academy with 800 students.

 

It was be good to get everyone's thoughts on this and other people's experiences.

 

Thanks

 

DB.

Edited April 9, 2015 by dbishop866

[psydii]

@GREED has made this:

MIS Market Statistics | The Eduware Network

 

IMHO Sims is an massive sea anchor of a product, slowing innovation of the use of technology in education. For LA schools, it is stupidly cheap, and it locks you into a Windows centric world, and until recently, woe betide anyone relying on lesson by lesson registration in a mobile (wifi/laptop) environment.

 

The web-based upstarts point to the future and how it should be, but again that sea anchor with its 80%+ market share monopolises the cash required to build competition... which is why SIMS has to be very slow to innovate - if they implemented good ideas quickly they would completely destroy the competition and have the anti-monopolies authorities all over them.

[GREED]

Thanks @psydii for the link.

[scholarpack]

 

if they implemented good ideas quickly they would completely destroy the competition and have the anti-monopolies authorities all over them.

 

 

Anti-monopolies authorities are concerned was business malpractices and leveraging an unfair competetive advantage - for example if the large player in a market reduced their price to £0 for a contract extension, in order to shut out competitors and gain the business at full price again in future, in the hope that the small competitor will not be around by then.

 

Anti-monopolies authorities are not at all concerned with what features are in, or not in, the various products on the market.

 

Implementing "good ideas quickly" isn't illegal..some companies are just quicker at innovating than others..

 

Disclosure: I'm CEO of a cloud based Primary MIS supplier.

[pcstru]

The web-based upstarts point to the future and how it should be, but again that sea anchor with its 80%+ market share monopolises the cash required to build competition... which is why SIMS has to be very slow to innovate - if they implemented good ideas quickly they would completely destroy the competition and have the anti-monopolies authorities all over them.

I expect SIMS is slow to innovate because they have a very complex product with many interdependencies between 'modules' and since they have ~80% share of the market (nearly 20,000 schools), any quality problems after release tend to hit them hard. In the popular analogy, they are a supertanker.

 

In terms of being able to re-engineer and migrate the product, they have two significant problems; having the people to actually do it (they can't simply switch all their skilled resource to new product) and how they then go about it (I wouldn't be surprised if core integrator and the DBase data conversion still woke Phil Neal up at night in a cold sweat), do they go for a big bang or try and live with the constraints of the existing database?

 

All in all, they must have some interesting challenges to look forward to.

[matt40k]

@scholarpack - like I said to you before, they should have forced buying off the G-cloud (or whatever they call it these days) at the fix prices. Software companies have three types of costs:

1/ Infrastructure

2/ Support

3/ Development

We can basically ignore 1 as its pretty much nothing and its easy to formula a cost per unit, especially with the cloud. So can't cut costs there. No 2 again normally gets boiled down to a per unit cost. Which leaves 3, which is where the profit comes from. If you write something for 1 school, you could sell it 1,000 with little to no extra effort, now imagine the profit on repeating it to over 22,000. That's the staving out competition your on about. Admitting you'd have a few years of higher costs, but I can't image the shareholders would be happy bleeding money for too long, nor can I imagine it'll be long before the others look more attractive options.

 

Also i read a fair bit that there is rumour that they are have financial troubles - does anyone know if there is any substance to this and would reconmend Bromcom?

It got dismissed (https://www.thegazette.co.uk/notice/L-60129-1580430) after they got a cash injected from somewhere - they haven't said where it came from or why.

[Romeo-Romeo-Juan]

@dbishop866 i think something that really needs to be pointed out here is that there are many alternatives to Sims, Bromcom is one yes but are you aware of the likes of Advanced Learnings Progresso, Arbor, Rm Integris to name but a few. To move away from something like Sims is a big task but people are! and there has to be a reason behind this. I would suggest looking at a few alternatives as each system has its own merits and its all about what your schools needs are.

[matt40k]

In terms of being able to re-engineer and migrate the product, they have two significant problems; having the people to actually do it (they can't simply switch all their skilled resource to new product) and how they then go about it (I wouldn't be surprised if core integrator and the DBase data conversion still woke Phil Neal up at night in a cold sweat), do they go for a big bang or try and live with the constraints of the existing database?

 

All in all, they must have some interesting challenges to look forward to.

 

That user base is the main problem, point and case, Nova-T4. It isn't the either one either, the list is pretty long where the customer adoption rate is horrendously slow. As for constraints, I think they're already so far down the path they don't know how to live without them. ONE 4 (the new LA MIS system) is riddled with legacy and if the rumors are true about SIMS7, it will too.

 

@dbishop866 i think something that really needs to be pointed out here is that there are many alternatives to Sims

 

It has, see above, @psydii posted a link to @GREED site with a very good list and answers to common questions

Edited April 10, 2015 by matt40k

[CAM]

SIMS shouldn't be written off entirely though. Yes it is the largest product on the market, but as much as people on here would probably want to you wouldn't dump MS Windows either because it's the largest.

 

Remember, 80% of schools use SIMS so that's a lot of teachers, data managers, suppliers and office staff familiar with the interface, workflows and ability to support it.

[NotSoFast]

We are a similar school to the OP's and we use Progresso. MUCH cheaper than SIMS and meets our needs very well.

[SimonLewin]

Also i read a fair bit that there is rumour that they are have financial troubles - does anyone know if there is any substance to this and would reconmend Bromcom?

 

Bromcom is certainly here and all is well. We even took on additional salesperson last month. I see that matt40K has already referred to a London Gazette notice, which dates from 2012. This was all dealt with and if anyone is interested in details please PM me. Even though it is now historic, you may be amused at the detail, even if we found it rather annoying at the time. A competitor, who no longer works in this market (the irony) tried to capitalize on it by creating negative publicity about us at that time.

[rpwillis]

@scholarpack If you write something for 1 school, you could sell it 1,000 with little to no extra effort, now imagine the profit on repeating it to over 22,000.

 

Got to disagree with this. Writing something for one customer (usually yourself) is easy. Making it general so that it handles the requirements of many different customers is hard.

[matt40k]

I think your thinking of the difference between scripter/junior developer vs senior developer/solution architect @rpwillis. It why senior developer/solution architect command a higher salary to a scripter/junior developer

[psydii]

A bit harsh? If the core of your app is generalised, and you have a small set of customers, each with needs that are bespoke to their particular way of doing things, then you code on a case by case basis. Sure generalise where possible, but consider this: quick and dirty code that meets the requirement of the customer who asked for it (1-2day's work) or two weeks+ generalising the use case and developing a solution that could work for thousands of clients on the off chance any of them ever happen to need to do the same thing (and you happen to exponentially increase your customer base) in the future.

 

MIS providers are going for the huge customer bases (because MIS's are hugely complex and not only have to keep pace with customer enhancement requests and the competition, they also have to deal with changing Government requirements on data collection and reporting). SIMS already has a huge customer base. A problem it has is even if 10 schools all ask for the same feature that is only 0.0001% of their customers. If the same number of Bromcom or Progresso customers made such a request, that is a substantial section of their user base and thus the feature is more likely to make it into dev.

[matt40k]

A bit harsh? If the core of your app...

 

I was talking in the context of a selling a MIS system. I'm not saying quick and dirty code doesn't happen, its just you wouldn't want to do it if you were building a MIS system - even in single school things changes, just thinking about how much of a pain it would be if you hardcoded it all and they wanted to switch to a 2 week timetable from a 1 week. Heck, even look at @rpwillis stuff, if it was me, a scripter, I wouldn't have been able to bolt on half as much as he has because he's a far superior developer.

@psydii - Developer to Customer ratio, maybe one for @GREED questionnaire (he currently has "How many staff do you employ per customer")