Gongalong Posted June 19, 2019 Posted June 19, 2019 Hi folks, Just after any positive and/or negative feedback from any schools using either AMI Education or CRBCunninghams, as we are considering them for replacing our current tills. We use Tucasi for the online accounts. Thanks
howartp Posted June 19, 2019 Posted June 19, 2019 Don't know about the new Cunninghams. The old one stored prices to £0.25000000001p which supported my feelings about the dev team. 1
Jawloms Posted June 19, 2019 Posted June 19, 2019 I think you'll find plenty of negative comments on these forums about CRB Cunninghams, and hardly any positive. 1
Gongalong Posted June 19, 2019 Author Posted June 19, 2019 We know a couple of local schools that use Cunninghams, and although they've had issues the overall picture seems to be positive. Still, interested to hear the negative as well!
pete Posted June 19, 2019 Posted June 19, 2019 $other_school has Cunninghams as the incumbent and when we jointly sought bids for a catering refresh across two schools, they were only invited in order to be polite. From what I recall, the issues with Cunninghams (both the demo and the concerns re the existing installation) were: The system being demonstrated couldn't go offline (connectivity lost to a till, for whatever reason) without contacting Cunninghams support for a code which (given how short break times are and how long phone hold queues can be) was a deal-breaker for us. Attention to detail on the proposal documents was lacking - grammar, spelling and some technical details were incorrect. One document had an unrelated school on it Sales person giving the demo was unprepared (hadn't checked the hardware worked - it didn't) and dismissive of concerns from incumbent school. Thoroughly failed to impress and lost the sale about ~10 minutes in. He then made excuses when called on this. End-of-day procedures were manual, not automatic and were frequently unreliable (crashes). Fingerprint readers demonstrated were UareU 4500 series rather than something better (Secugen Hamster Plus). Slow phone response times. Price gouging when updating coin readers 2
Jawloms Posted June 19, 2019 Posted June 19, 2019 Useful? http://www.edugeek.net/forums/how-do-you-do/205207-cunninghams-support-contract.html Stuart 1
bossman Posted June 19, 2019 Posted June 19, 2019 We use CRB....have done for the past 10 years....we only use their software SLA....Tills can be purchased cheaper and just install your Microsoft OS and then CRB install their software at a minimum cost...we do use the UareU 4500 of which cost us £60 online as opposed to CRB £150 quoted....we find they do the job just fine only had to replace 2 in all the ten years of use.... We don't have any reval units as we are totally cashless... Its a virtual server as CRB Quoted £5k to build a tin box so cost is negligible (my time)... We are linked into ParentPay which has its ups and downs as does the CRB system but all in all its been a very reliable system.... Would like to find a cloud service which our tills could integrate with and manage the bio-metrics side of things too...CRB might offer soon? who knows?.... Always found their support very friendly and knowledgeable about their software.... Cost for software support only is negligible too....so we as a school are happy with what we've got.... 1
Gongalong Posted June 27, 2019 Author Posted June 27, 2019 A last call for any feedback, especially from AMI Education users. Thanks!
eddyc Posted June 27, 2019 Posted June 27, 2019 A last call for any feedback, especially from AMI Education users. Thanks! We use AMI (and Gladstone back before the re-brand). I introduced the system in September 2012 and it was solid for 5 years but as the hardware came to end of it's like we did have issues with tills crashing etc, but that is probably more to do with them being 5 years old and running XP. In the summer of 2017, we re-ran a tender for replacement hardware and went out to all of the companies. AMI wonder the tender by several thousand pounds and installed all new tills (SSD, more ram than previous and Windows 10 LTSB) Everything has been working great again since then and we've not had any issues. We did have a student punch the kiosk which smashed the touch screen (which was a chargeable repair) and they were very prompt at helping with this. I hope this helps. eddyc 1
DrBeaker Posted June 27, 2019 Posted June 27, 2019 We use Cunninghams - they seem OK for the most part. Only involvement so far was with getting their stuff moved over to a new SIMs server. We paid them to do the migration. Best advice I'd say is make sure that problems with their kit, equipment, software etc don't become an IT problem. 2
DrBeaker Posted June 27, 2019 Posted June 27, 2019 We use AMI (and Gladstone back before the re-brand). I introduced the system in September 2012 and it was solid for 5 years but as the hardware came to end of it's like we did have issues with tills crashing etc, but that is probably more to do with them being 5 years old and running XP. In the summer of 2017, we re-ran a tender for replacement hardware and went out to all of the companies. AMI wonder the tender by several thousand pounds and installed all new tills (SSD, more ram than previous and Windows 10 LTSB) Everything has been working great again since then and we've not had any issues. We did have a student punch the kiosk which smashed the touch screen (which was a chargeable repair) and they were very prompt at helping with this. I hope this helps. eddyc That's a brilliant use case of Windows 10 LTSB and exactly what it was envisioned as I suppose. Best example I've come across yet. 2
FragglePete Posted June 27, 2019 Posted June 27, 2019 We're with Cunnighams and have been for quite sometime. The system I find clunky, but it works without too much input from us. Integrates with Schoolcomms for us and had no real bother from it. Always found their support to be a tad 'rude' and very slow but generally our catering manager deals with them. We have one Reval unit which we upgraded the Coin Mech and Note Loader ourselves using a third party company as Cunninghams wanted £495 per upgrade. We got it done for less than £70 all in. Should be concerned that the reval unit runs Windows 7 Embedded and I'd imagine that'll be the next thing to start worrying about. We find the speed of the finger readers pretty good compared to what we used to use (Vericool - now, that system was a joke!). Initial enrolment of the new intake takes us about a couple of hours in total. We were kind of forced towards Cunninghams by our catering company as they had used them before and knew the system, but I would have preferred to gone elsewhere - LiveRegister looked pretty good, NRS was also impressive but expensive. Would I recommend them? Yes and No - yes, as it does work without too many issues over the years, but No as I just don't like the way they work and how the software works overall - but, as I said, it does work. Pete 1
DrBeaker Posted June 27, 2019 Posted June 27, 2019 We're with Cunnighams and have been for quite sometime. The system I find clunky, but it works without too much input from us. Integrates with Schoolcomms for us and had no real bother from it. Always found their support to be a tad 'rude' and very slow but generally our catering manager deals with them. We have one Reval unit which we upgraded the Coin Mech and Note Loader ourselves using a third party company as Cunninghams wanted £495 per upgrade. We got it done for less than £70 all in. Should be concerned that the reval unit runs Windows 7 Embedded and I'd imagine that'll be the next thing to start worrying about. We find the speed of the finger readers pretty good compared to what we used to use (Vericool - now, that system was a joke!). Initial enrolment of the new intake takes us about a couple of hours in total. We were kind of forced towards Cunninghams by our catering company as they had used them before and knew the system, but I would have preferred to gone elsewhere - LiveRegister looked pretty good, NRS was also impressive but expensive. Would I recommend them? Yes and No - yes, as it does work without too many issues over the years, but No as I just don't like the way they work and how the software works overall - but, as I said, it does work. Pete Generally our catering manager deals with them - that's what it should be unless there's actually a tech issue. I always try to push it back to them to sort. I know once their support said to them "get your IT team to open it up and connect a keyboard and monitor, it's only a PC" (which is how I found out when the catering manager came and asked me) so why the hell aren't YOU doing that if we're paying YOU for support? They came out afterwards.
David44 Posted November 18, 2019 Posted November 18, 2019 Tills can be purchased cheaper and just install your Microsoft OS and then CRB install their software at a minimum cost... Can I ask where you purchase the tills from or even just the model of the till you are using with CRB Cunninghams so I have something to search on? We have been quoted over a grand per till and I am sure we can find cheaper than that. They are just PCs with a touchscreen monitor after all.
mavhc Posted November 18, 2019 Posted November 18, 2019 Don't know about the new Cunninghams. The old one stored prices to £0.25000000001p which supported my feelings about the dev team. Wow, that's...(must be more polite)...something a GCSE CS student should know to avoid.
maark Posted November 18, 2019 Posted November 18, 2019 AMI have been pretty good - support in general is good though they seemed a bit overwhelmed at start of academic year. They will try and charge you high annual hardware support cost for tills and readers - we don't pay this just have a spare swap out till but we do pay hardware support for cash loaders
leegcvcc Posted November 18, 2019 Posted November 18, 2019 I'd love to know how and where to get tills to replace the CRB XP tills we have! We have a cashloader and 6 tills of which 4 need replacing. Can anyone share some info on the place to buy and any config?
supportman Posted November 19, 2019 Posted November 19, 2019 Always found their support to be a tad 'rude' and very slow but generally our catering manager deals with them. We found this as well to the point where some of our staff are scared to ring them. I personally find the system incredibly complicated with all their schedualed tasks and convoluted installs. I do wonder if there is something better out there....
Gongalong Posted November 21, 2019 Author Posted November 21, 2019 As feedback, we went with AMI in the end. It was a rather tortuous move, although I appreciate these sorts of moves are never easy, but their support has been good. Now everything is working fine. 1
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