Moving to Bromcom from SIMS

[Reboot_IT]

Hello,

 

Apologies if this seems like a duplication of my last post regarding Arbor, but I wanted a clear separation between Bromcom and Arbor.

 

We're a small MAT consisting of both Secondary and Primary Schools. We have SIMS at the moment and are looking at moving to something a bit more FFP! We have scheduled Bromcom in for a demonstration in a couple of weeks. If people can give me any feedback on their transition and any issues they faced it would be much appreciated. Positive experiences are welcomed as well.

 

We'd like to be able to give them examples of potential road humps we may come across and get them to explain how we'll get over them!

 

Thanks in advance.

[stgoodyeara]

Hello,

 

Apologies if this seems like a duplication of my last post regarding Arbor, but I wanted a clear separation between Bromcom and Arbor.

 

We're a small MAT consisting of both Secondary and Primary Schools. We have SIMS at the moment and are looking at moving to something a bit more FFP! We have scheduled Bromcom in for a demonstration in a couple of weeks. If people can give me any feedback on their transition and any issues they faced it would be much appreciated. Positive experiences are welcomed as well.

 

We'd like to be able to give them examples of potential road humps we may come across and get them to explain how we'll get over them!

 

Thanks in advance.

 

We are not MAT just a smallish LA secondary. We have just sign up to move SIMS to Bromcom going live with Bromcom in September having looked at Arbor and discounted it. Really only posting as im interested in what people might say.

[RootsSchImp]

I work for Bromcom and I think migration is one of our strongest areas-the team is great. That said, the challenge is really about how you get your staff to use the new system so success to a large degree depends on you.

 

The biggest mistake I see our sch adopters make is failing to make the most of the new system. Support staff get a couple of hours training and basically everyone tries to replicate exactly what they did in Sims. Your new MIS will be able to do different things and there will be great opportunities to make admin processes more efficient but you have to reassess those processes in light of the new tools you have available. Get someone with a good understanding of systems to go on all the module training courses so he/she can help the admin staff do this.

 

Biggest mistake of Mats is not taking the opportunity to standardise subjects, assessments, names etc. Your data will be so much powerful if you can compare like for like across schools.

 

Good luck with whatever system you choose.

 

Ed

[Ditto]

Biggest mistake of Mats is not taking the opportunity to standardise subjects, assessments, names etc. Your data will be so much powerful if you can compare like for like across schools.

Ed

That's an extremely useful observation and one that I expect is obvious in hindsight.

[RootsSchImp]

Not as obvious as I'd like it to be. More than one MAT has come to me with the objection that resources I've made for them in power BI "don't work", when the issue is they show that the underlying data is a mess.

 

There's another lesson in this, a weakness of all MIS companies (us included) which is to imply you can have sophisticated, trust wide analysis without any effort. You need a data manager at mat level who understands how the analysis products work and how to keep their inputs straight. You just can't skimp having that expertise in house. If you try you'll just hop from product to product and none of them will work because garbage in: garbage out.

[djrscally]

garbage in: garbage out.

 

Preach, brother!

[MkII]

I work for Bromcom and I think migration is one of our strongest areas-the team is great. That said, the challenge is really about how you get your staff to use the new system so success to a large degree depends on you.

 

The biggest mistake I see our sch adopters make is failing to make the most of the new system. Support staff get a couple of hours training and basically everyone tries to replicate exactly what they did in Sims. Your new MIS will be able to do different things and there will be great opportunities to make admin processes more efficient but you have to reassess those processes in light of the new tools you have available. Get someone with a good understanding of systems to go on all the module training courses so he/she can help the admin staff do this.

 

Biggest mistake of Mats is not taking the opportunity to standardise subjects, assessments, names etc. Your data will be so much powerful if you can compare like for like across schools.

 

Good luck with whatever system you choose.

 

Ed

 

Our local authority want to do all high schools (it's in the pre planning stages currently). A central management team would oversee that it works for them as it will be purchased centrally on behalf of all high schools. We're currently all on SIMS. How would that mesh with you?

[RootsSchImp]

Hi @MkII,

 

In terms of the migrations that would be a three way process between you, us and schools. We've never done a whole LA at once, but we've done some pretty big MATs (Oasis has a few over 50 schs) so we can handle scale.

 

In terms of what you'd get, you'd have two options - you could just buy the MIS for the schools, and choose to manage areas centrally with a common set of configurations or delegate to schools. You can make assessment templates in a central repository that individual schools download, ditto reports so potentially you can do a lot of your schools' data management for them...provided everyone follows a shared set of procedures. With this option though you'd still have to pull data out of each system independently for your central reporting, so...

 

Option 2 is you also buy our data warehouse solution which automates data transfer from each school into a central store where you can report on it using our native tools or Power BI (*whispers* which is much better than our native tools).

 

That's very broad strokes - obvs devil is in the detail, so I'd recommend getting someone to come and give you a presentation, even if you're not ready to go to tender, it can be useful to see what's out there and talk about common issues as a way of sharpening up your tender requirements.

 

Ed

[Damon]

I work for a support team and we have recently moved several of our schools over to Bromcom. Overall, the data side of things is remarkably straightforward. The backup was sent off securely to Bromcom and they perform the conversion process on your behalf. It was promptly processed and allowed us to carry out some training on an initial snapshot of the data before we went live. We carried out a decent amount of cross checking afterwards to ensure the data was accurate but didn't find any issues. We did perform a decent amount of data cleansing in SIMS beforehand so I'd recommend that in any case.

 

Regardless of which system you go for, you'll need to factor in the Assessment setup and historical results. As aforementioned, this may be a good chance to standardise! From what I've seen so far, I prefer the Assessment setup in Bromcom as every result is linked to subject/term/year group. In SIMS we had to create loads of different aspects and name them as Spring, Summer, Etc.. In Bromcom, you can just tick the subjects and terms you want to generate columns for and it's generated in a few clicks. We then used a mixture of the Assessment result importer and marksheet imports to bring over a good few years’ worth of data.

 

Data is only one aspect of the transition so the next hurdle is training. Our approach was to start with some in depth training ourselves, then we provided on site training to the schools using a copy of their data. This offered an element of familiarity during the process which proved to be really helpful. Bromcom were always on hand for site visits or via webinar so we had our hands held throughout. We also had one of our staff acting as a floor walker at each school when they went live, just to alleviate any little issues that cropped up.

 

Once the staff were left to their own devices, we had a good amount of support calls and last minute requests - How do I generate this report for the Governors? etc.. If you can plan for this, perhaps roping in some tech savvy staff to help out during this period would be helpful. Have a think about all of your process based tasks in advance, things like Attendance or Behaviour followups. Plenty of schools like sending letters but this could be replaced with text/email/parent app so it's worth getting that clear with the admin team in advance. That way, expectations are managed and it can be part of the training process.

 

I'd also consider hiding aspects of the system that staff won't need. We realised afterwards that built in reports can be hidden/shown at a role or individual level. Schools found it much easier when we limited the options to things they will be using on a regular basis. You can always expand this at a later date as Staff become more familiar with the MIS.

 

Some other things to consider are any third party apps you use that link to SIMS. The more modern apps with web interfaces linked in pretty easily and you don't have to worry about services stopping on a creaky SIMS server. However, there were one or two that didn't link at all. To be fair to Bromcom, they are working hard to resolve this and I believe they have fixed one already. On that note, I've found them very responsive to changes/requests which is really refreshing. Regardless of this, I would definitely gather a list of any third party apps and ascertain whether they are still necessary or could be done via other means. We had some messaging products which could easily be replaced with the built in Bromcom messaging system and parent app.

 

In all, we had the odd grumble along the way but in my mind, that's to be expected during a period of change. We're a few months into the launch and we're already starting to see the fruits of our labour. There's lots of exciting functionality that wasn't available to us before and staff are spotting further efficiencies as they go. Every time I speak to one of the Head's we're swapping tips and marvelling at what can be done. On that front, it's going to be really important to get the buy-in from the SLT at each school and possibly some representative business managers. Regardless of the product, if this decision is top down, it'll be harder to garner support from those that will be using it every day. The success of the transition often depends on this.

[supportman]

Some other things to consider are any third party apps you use that link to SIMS. The more modern apps with web interfaces linked in pretty easily and you don't have to worry about services stopping on a creaky SIMS server. However, there were one or two that didn't link at all. To be fair to Bromcom, they are working hard to resolve this and I believe they have fixed one already. On that note, I've found them very responsive to changes/requests which is really refreshing. Regardless of this, I would definitely gather a list of any third party apps and ascertain whether they are still necessary or could be done via other means. We had some messaging products which could easily be replaced with the built in Bromcom messaging system and parent app.

This is the biggest issue here but it is more one of naivety at the moment as we have 6 or 7 bits of software hanging off Sims that people use daily.

 

Can you list what products you use and what works/doesn't work. I also hear Bromcom can do a few extra things like comms and parent engagement. i would be interested in what you use.

[Damon]

The schools that we moved over had a mixture of software. The following apps were really easy to setup and are fully automated:

 

InVentry

Teachers2Parents (Via WONDE)

NoMoreMarking (Via Assembly)

CPOMS

USO Autoupdate (LGFL/Atomwide)

 

Schoolcomms was used by one of the schools but it only had basic integration. I think Bromcom will investigate further functionality if we need it but we're planning to start using the built in messaging and parent app stuff anyway so it's not really worth pursuing. Bromcom has the ability to send texts/emails direct from the MIS and if you opt for the parent app, you can send notifications, publish reports and so on. That's more the direction we're wanting to go as better core functionality with less reliance on third party apps has lots of advantages.

 

Currently, one of the schools uses parent pay and they have a bit of contract remaining. Initially, this wasn't fully supported by Bromcom as they have their own payment system. However, the last I heard from my colleague is that a solution has been developed with Parent Pay and they are just awaiting sign off. This is pretty quick work considering the school has only been live for a month or so! Another one they're working on is Evolve but again, I think the school will probably end up ditching this and moving to Bromcom's built in solution once contracts are up.

 

The last ones that are causing us pain are the CAPITA apps. Frustratingly, they only seem to integrate with SIMS so you'll probably have the same issues with any alternative MIS. One of the schools uses Agora and there's no support for this at present. Personally I'm not a massive fan of it anyway as schools end up jumping through loads of hoops to do some basic tasks. However, the school has a fair bit left of the contract and I'm not sure whether there's much hope of getting integration with this. My colleague is the one who's following this up though so I can't say for sure. When we raise support calls they take months to be responded to so I'm not holding out much hope for CAPITA doing some work on this!

 

Lastly, there's good old FMS. The software that offers you a time warp to the 90's, though arguably this could be classed as fashionable now! As far as I know, FMS does not integrate with anything other than SIMS. There could be a number of political reasons for this, or perhaps it's just blind ignorance on their part. Hopefully we'll start the process of moving schools onto Bromcom finance in due course. For now, they just use FMS without salary projections. Depending on the school, this isn't always an issue. If you're in a trust, perhaps you have PS Financials or something along those lines anyway.

 

When you're researching the third party software in use, it would be worth seeing if this functionality can be provided as part of your new MIS and factoring this into your decision. SIMS has to rely on a lot of bolstering for things that schools really need these days. The cloud MIS alternatives usually have some more stuff built in which helps to reduce costs and provides a number of efficiencies in terms of data management. However, stuff like Inventry is great and still has it's place. I should imagine most MIS providers can provide a list of what they can support but I would negotiate any unsupported products that are deal breakers for you. It may be that a few conversations can be had and it'll be added to the supported list. Especially when we're talking about modern cloud based apps.

Edited April 27, 2019 by Damon

[supportman]

Great to hear there is a solution for ParentPay as thats the big one for us certainly.

 

The only other one we use would be RoomBookingSystem.

[Bromcom_Support]

Hi All

 

We are just waiting on the final sign off for the Parent Pay interface so it will be available for customers shortly. We do have file exports currently that schools can use with populate Parent Pay, the support team can help set these up for you. With regards to RoomBookingSystem (https://www.roombookingsystem.co.uk), they are not currently a partner with us but there is nothing to stop this happening. The amount of 3rd parties we work with continues to grow and we provide timely support to those who want to use our APIs, making it an easy process. Also note that many companies are using GroupCall and Wonde to integrate with MIS systems. It may be the case that RoomBookingSystem is using on of them. If this is the case then an adjustment can be made by those companies to get the data needed from Bromcom to populate the RoomBookingSystem.

[timbo343]

Hi All

 

We are just waiting on the final sign off for the Parent Pay interface so it will be available for customers shortly. We do have file exports currently that schools can use with populate Parent Pay, the support team can help set these up for you. With regards to RoomBookingSystem (https://www.roombookingsystem.co.uk), they are not currently a partner with us but there is nothing to stop this happening. The amount of 3rd parties we work with continues to grow and we provide timely support to those who want to use our APIs, making it an easy process. Also note that many companies are using GroupCall and Wonde to integrate with MIS systems. It may be the case that RoomBookingSystem is using on of them. If this is the case then an adjustment can be made by those companies to get the data needed from Bromcom to populate the RoomBookingSystem.

We use the SIMS Extract Tool when syncing SIMS to ParentEveningSystem (same comoany as roombookingsystem). Not sure how other MIS work regarding this unless it's CSV but seeing Bromcom integrate with parenteveningsystem would be great as we are in the process of looking for alternativites to MISs.

[Reboot_IT]

Hello everyone, Just a quick update. We've just had Bromcom in for a demonstration and had key stakeholders from our schools (CEO, data managers, headteachers and Deputies) and it went down very well. We have Arbor in next week! Edited May 3, 2019 by Reboot_IT

[Ditto]

Hello everyone, Just a quick update. We've just had Bromcom in for a demonstration and had key stakeholders from our schools (CEO, data managers, headteachers and Deputies) and it went down very well. We have Arbor in next week!

Exciting times! Are you reviewing any others? If I were to come up with a list of 5 , I'd settle on Bromcom, Arbor, SchoolPod, Progresso and RMIntegris.

[Reboot_IT]

We have Arbor in this week as well. I supported a couple of schools that used RMIntegris previously and I really liked it but I thought of it as more of a primary school product rather than secondary.

 

Here are some of the features demonstrated that I found interesting:

- easy to use, user friendly interface which is customisable

- Works across many devices and operating systems

- login with Google/Microsoft

- Video training guides linked so people can try and solve their own problems (in an ideal world!)

- Lots of built in features that we pay separate companies for with SIMS (events and booking package, safeguarding, self-service for parents, parent payment (probably more!)

 

One of the big ones for us is the ability to report across the MAT and Bromcom seems to have this nailed.

[Ditto]

Re RMIntegris, perhaps true and I my involvement with it was in primary. However, I often met the opinion Progresso was secondary only, but it handled primary well and I understand they now provide primary assessment models as part of the package. The MAT factor is going to be increasingly important - it sounds as though you have most angles covered.

[ajp233]

Bromcom are charging for their Parent Pay integration

[CyBeRkId2002]

Hi all,

 

I have been meaning to post about our journey changing MIS for a few days but am struggling to find the time for one reason or another to dedicate the time I would like to properly talk through our experiences right from initial research/decision making to the actual migration.

 

What I will say right now are a couple of things:

 

Firstly - changing MIS is tough... but absolutely do-able and accepting an MIS that you have always had and most other schools use should not be a reason not to investigate options

Secondly - plan, plan, plan!!! the success of rollout among staff absolutely involves having someone (or a team) who have a clear vision on how the MIS can make processes better within the school and working with key figures across the school to implement these is key. Migration of data (at least in our experience) is excellent, migration of processes is what takes planning

Thirdly - With regards specifics, we chose Bromcom and have yet to find very little that we want to do that it cannot. Day one we had a system that was automating detentions (and we have a complex structure with departments doing their own thing), informing parents about behaviour, scheduling reports that previously people spent minutes to hours compiling... and many other things. We have just rolled out useful BI dashboard (some to all staff, some higher levels to leadership) and we are only on Week 2!

 

I will be posting a more comprehensive post on the entire switch in the very near future but have no doubt that investigating your options is the right move!

[Ditto]

Good to hear - fear of change is the first hurdle to overcome for many schools.

[Damon]

Bromcom are charging for their Parent Pay integration

 

I'm not sure where you heard this but it's not the case.

 

ParentPay integration is now working and we're getting a regular feed for attendance. There's no service to install or manage, it's all done from Bromcom's end. The ParentPay admin user doesn't have to do anything differently either.

[CyBeRkId2002]

I was surprised to read on here that they were charging for an integration. Not something I had heard of .

 

We were however pushing for parentpay integration a couple of months back and despite some too and fro with parentpay (it's coming soon, it's in testing etc) they eventually said it wasn't on their development roadmap.

 

Any chance you could drop me a quick pm on how this is currently working for you. All we are interested in at present is a way to get students details transferred to parentpay automatically (without manual missync uploads) and be able to get parent contacts transferred to parentpay (this has not been possible at all manually)

[Bromcom_Hus]

Hi All,

 

Just to be clear, we do not charge any schools or third parties to use/consume our Read APIs, as we do not incur any development costs. Any Third Party can register to our Partner Support Programme, and they are supported for FREE of charge and they can consume our APIs for FREE of charge.

 

However, any integration which Bromcom implements, that incurs development cost, there are charge for it as Bromcom needs to continue to maintain the integration code and implement the any changes that third party product enforces us within the timeframe they enforce on us.

 

Unfortunately, ParentPay is one of the integration we ended up implementing ourselves. We had number of attempts and requests to ParentPay to consume our APIs to retrieve the data they require, but due to their busy development schedules, this did not happened for years.

 

There are still option within MIS to schedule a report and periodically upload manually to ParentPay, we are not taking that away.

 

Regards,

Huseyin

[Anjelica]

Reboot_IT - You should consider asking Bromcom to provide you with details of a Reference Site who you can talk to. Unfortunately, when we were considering moving, our nearest site was a full day trip away but it was worth going and seeing how they used the MIS. Now there are a lot more schools using Bromcom you should hopefully have somewhere closer.

 

Changing MIS is a daunting task but it is very doable especially as Bromcom do all the hard work (when converting from SIMS).