SIMS Replacement

[lmrogers]

Good Afternoon,

 

I am looking at possible alternatives to SIMS and preferably a cloud based MIS system. Has anyone got any recommendations and experience in completing a migration away from SIMS? I am looking at Bromcom and iSAMS as possible alternatives.

 

Thanks

[LeMarchand]

Good Afternoon,

 

I am looking at possible alternatives to SIMS and preferably a cloud based MIS system. Has anyone got any recommendations and experience in completing a migration away from SIMS? I am looking at Bromcom and iSAMS as possible alternatives.

 

Thanks

 

One of my Primaries went to Arbor. A couple of minor teething problems (the documentation was occasionally ambiguous) which are probably now sorted for newbies. They're very happy with it. From what others on here say, may not be quite up to snuff for KS3+.

[TechMonkey]

We use iSAMS. I've not used Bromcom. Happy with it. Staff are happy with it.

 

Migration was interesting but any migration will be. I've seen some MIS teams offer a hands off migration, you give them a login and they do it for you. iSAMS don't (or didn't) do this, you populate Excel sheets for them. I would recommend spending the extra time to create SQL scripts or reports to produce the data so it is replicable.

 

Don't forget that the school, especially management, need to be involved as this is not an IT project, just an IT led project.

[lmrogers]

We use iSAMS. I've not used Bromcom. Happy with it. Staff are happy with it.

 

Migration was interesting but any migration will be. I've seen some MIS teams offer a hands off migration, you give them a login and they do it for you. iSAMS don't (or didn't) do this, you populate Excel sheets for them. I would recommend spending the extra time to create SQL scripts or reports to produce the data so it is replicable.

 

Don't forget that the school, especially management, need to be involved as this is not an IT project, just an IT led project.

 

Yeah to be honest any migration help these companies offer would be great! Surprisingly it is actually something I was asked to look into by management so who knows where this could lead to.

[Ditto]

Good Afternoon,

 

I am looking at possible alternatives to SIMS and preferably a cloud based MIS system. Has anyone got any recommendations and experience in completing a migration away from SIMS? I am looking at Bromcom and iSAMS as possible alternatives.

 

Thanks

Are you a single school or a MAT? I'm assuming you are either all-though school or primary, but possibly independent? I'd say the main part of the market for secondary is Bromcom, Arbor, Progresso (Cloud School from OneAdvanced). Possible additions to that list would be RM Integris and SchoolPod. If primary, RM Integris and ScholarPack. Another outsider would be PupilAsset, recently bought by Juniper Education. If you fancy being a leading edge trail-blazer, I'm sure there is a new MIS provider in England, but can not track it down right now - I'm sure someone will step in!

[paulkerton]

Remember they all have different target markets and strengths in particular markets too.

 

If market share is any indication

RM rules the roost in Nurseries, Primary and Special Schools

Bromcom is king in Secondary and Allthrough schools

Schoolpod with Arbor a very close second in PRUs

 

Arbor, Bromcom and Scholarpack are picking up the most new customers recently.

 

It's worth investigating all the ones I've mentioned as well as AdvancedLearning, ScholarPack and PupilAsset.

[lmrogers]

We are secondary grammar and Bromcom seems to be the way to go. Would be good to hear experiences of Bromcom having never really seen it.

[chris11256]

We're a Sixth form and use iSams, have no problems with it at all. We have it cloud hosted rather than on site and IT involvement really is minimal(beyond new user creation).

 

Can't comment on the cost as it goes on the academic budget rather than IT, so I never see the invoices.

[CyBeRkId2002]

Bromcom as a trust here... and have been for a little over 12 months.

 

Migration (which most people worry about) is seamless ... quite literally

Software is intuitive and generally very user friendly

System is constantly evolving and developing

Team listen to feedback and make changes accordingly

 

My experience can be found here and is still valid... will be adding a '1 Year On' post in the near future but if you have any specific questions, queries or concerns feel free to PM me!

 

Have a good weekend.

[JackieR]

I have also been tasked with finding an alternative to Sims. We are a 3 school MAT, infant and primary schools. I would be interested in feedback from anyone who uses any of the systems mentioned in this thread, good and bad.

[XiJ]

Almost all of your primaries (and infants, nurseries) have gone arbor. None have looked back. From single schools to MATS feedback is excellent.

 

We’ve not been too involved in the migration process other than to run a sims backup and upload to arbors servers. The rest happens magically.

[DODICT]

Hi all - happy to discuss experience of Bromcom which has been largely positive since moving a 4 school MAT - (2 secondary, 2 primary) over from SIMS, Facility and Integris. We've been live with secondaries for just over a year and primaries since the new year. As well as rationalising and quality assuring a processes accross the Trust we had a desire to introduce some common reporting of key metrics for our academies and take away any repetitive reporting requirements for all stakeholders. We're not there yet across the board but we want those key staff to be using and responding to the info we provide not spending their time collating or checking spreadsheets etc. Bromcom has enabled us to do achieve a great deal toward that aim and we have definitely improved the information we provide to certain audiences with more on our roadmap. PowerBI reporting has been a key element for us in that and I think we've used it pretty well - and over time I only see that improving as we refine our outputs and build familiarity and confidence of staff usage.

 

MCAS the parental app was probably the one let down for us - it didn't quite do everything our outgoing specialist solution did but that said many of those gaps have since been filled after feeding back the areas for development. And I think that would be my key point - Bromcom is a solution at the leading edge of the MIS market at present and who's nose is in front all depends on your exact requirements but I anticipate they will continue to grow in the market due to their capacity to evolve and develop their solution closely inline with customer requirements. Its quite refreshing to see a company so keen to listen and respond to customer feedback - seems common sense to me but having worked in education for nearly 20 years its not something I have encountered that often unfortunately.

 

If you would like to discuss further just drop me a message as I think a lot depends on what you want to achieve by changing MIS but happy to give you my open and honest opinion.

Edited June 28, 2020 by DODICT

[LeMarchand]

(Arbor) We’ve not been too involved in the migration process other than to run a sims backup and upload to arbors servers. The rest happens magically.

 

That's pretty much been my experience (apart from the aforementioned teething problems).

 

Best thing? I haven't had any questions about "how do you?" on a system I don't use! I'm guessing that it's fairly easy to use.

Edited June 29, 2020 by LeMarchand

[sonofsanta]

Good Afternoon,

 

I am looking at possible alternatives to SIMS and preferably a cloud based MIS system. Has anyone got any recommendations and experience in completing a migration away from SIMS? I am looking at Bromcom and iSAMS as possible alternatives.

 

Thanks

 

 

We're a selective secondary academy (i.e. a grammar school), not part of a trust but going it alone, with about 1200 kids. We were on FacilityCMIS for a decade, and have just migrated to Bromcom this month. We had all our demo meetings in December/January, so pretty recently; we looked at four options:

• SIMS, who are still not on the cloud, and still giving a vague "two years' time" for when their cloud platform will be ready, and they've been saying that for a lot of years now apparently. No thank you.
  
• Arbor, who to be fair looked really good, but are still ramping up their feature set for secondary schools and so weren't quite there yet for us. I'd recommend everyone who is looking to still look, because in a year or two they're going to be a really good option, but right now it didn't have everything we wanted (still relied on 3rd parties etc.)
  
• Bromcom, which I'll discuss more below as the choice we went with
  
• Progresso from Advanced (now called something generic, School Cloud or Cloud School or Cloud Cloud or whatever), which was... competent, but fell short of Bromcom in myriad little ways all over. It just wasn't as good.
  

 

Top things we liked about Bromcom, keeping it brief: the interface is very intuitive, and still improving. Information is laid out in a sensible, useful fashion, and tasks you'll need to do are arranged and set out in ways that make sense for your work flow (as opposed to Facility, where everything was laid out according to the data structure, not any human need). It can do absolutely everything: room bookings, payments, communications, safeguarding... and because of that, you have more data in this system than you would in any other, and that allows you to expose more information from that data (and the reporting engine is very straightforward, and there's PowerBI if you want something more powerful). And the product is always improving: about half the things we asked about in the demo, the presenter could name the school that had asked for this improvement, so there was very much a sense of collaboration where others (Advanced, for example, who we asked specifically about this) were very reluctant to let schools influence their product development.

 

Migration from CMIS involved uploading a SQL database dump via secure FTP and providing a Facilityusername/password, then Bromcom did everything. The only data that's not come across are some user-defined fields and assessment data, as we need to rebuild the assessment structure in Bromcom ourselves, and we can then import via CSV. I can't speak to a SIMS migration, but I imagine it'd be similar. They do two data cuts: one early on, so you can check the data and have a play with the system without worrying about damaging your data; and another a week before launch, so you don't need to spend weeks/months doing double entry (again, something not everyone did). Training is via webinar, which has been fine; having the test system to play on really helps. Launch has been a little odd for us under the circumstances but has gone smoothly, and we get a weekly phone call with a consultant, free of charge until we no longer need them, so we can ask all the little questions that have arisen from finally using the system in anger.

 

All in all, very happy with it, and it's much easier to use even while we're working our way through the learning-a-new-system stage (the global search is a godsend; you can guess what a setting might be called and turn the page up that way, instead of menu-hunting). By the time we've probably got our heads round all the aspects of it in a year or two, it should be amazing.

[Ditto]

We're a selective secondary academy (i.e. a grammar school), not part of a trust but going it alone, with about 1200 kids. We were on FacilityCMIS for a decade, and have just migrated to Bromcom this month. We had all our demo meetings in December/January, so pretty recently; we looked at four options:

• SIMS, who are still not on the cloud, and still giving a vague "two years' time" for when their cloud platform will be ready, and they've been saying that for a lot of years now apparently. No thank you.
  
• Arbor, who to be fair looked really good, but are still ramping up their feature set for secondary schools and so weren't quite there yet for us. I'd recommend everyone who is looking to still look, because in a year or two they're going to be a really good option, but right now it didn't have everything we wanted (still relied on 3rd parties etc.)
  
• Bromcom, which I'll discuss more below as the choice we went with
  
• Progresso from Advanced (now called something generic, School Cloud or Cloud School or Cloud Cloud or whatever), which was... competent, but fell short of Bromcom in myriad little ways all over. It just wasn't as good.
  

 

Top things we liked about Bromcom, keeping it brief: the interface is very intuitive, and still improving. Information is laid out in a sensible, useful fashion, and tasks you'll need to do are arranged and set out in ways that make sense for your work flow (as opposed to Facility, where everything was laid out according to the data structure, not any human need). It can do absolutely everything: room bookings, payments, communications, safeguarding... and because of that, you have more data in this system than you would in any other, and that allows you to expose more information from that data (and the reporting engine is very straightforward, and there's PowerBI if you want something more powerful). And the product is always improving: about half the things we asked about in the demo, the presenter could name the school that had asked for this improvement, so there was very much a sense of collaboration where others (Advanced, for example, who we asked specifically about this) were very reluctant to let schools influence their product development.

 

Migration from CMIS involved uploading a SQL database dump via secure FTP and providing a Facilityusername/password, then Bromcom did everything. The only data that's not come across are some user-defined fields and assessment data, as we need to rebuild the assessment structure in Bromcom ourselves, and we can then import via CSV. I can't speak to a SIMS migration, but I imagine it'd be similar. They do two data cuts: one early on, so you can check the data and have a play with the system without worrying about damaging your data; and another a week before launch, so you don't need to spend weeks/months doing double entry (again, something not everyone did). Training is via webinar, which has been fine; having the test system to play on really helps. Launch has been a little odd for us under the circumstances but has gone smoothly, and we get a weekly phone call with a consultant, free of charge until we no longer need them, so we can ask all the little questions that have arisen from finally using the system in anger.

 

All in all, very happy with it, and it's much easier to use even while we're working our way through the learning-a-new-system stage (the global search is a godsend; you can guess what a setting might be called and turn the page up that way, instead of menu-hunting). By the time we've probably got our heads round all the aspects of it in a year or two, it should be amazing.

Great review, thanks. As an ex-Progresso admininstrator/user, I think 'competent' is a good description. One thing missing from the comments is pricing. When I worked with progresso, we were a new free school growing every year. As a result price was very important and I managed to push the price per pupil, per year to what I thought was very low. We did look at migrating from Progresso, especially when we got new heads in to primary and secondary. When we compared licensing fees between Advanced Learning and say SIMS and iSAMS, the difference over a 5 years was very significant. SIMS migration costs were frightening! Did you see much difference on licensing fees?

 

My big take-away from the last year of MIS migration updates on Edugeek, is don't be afraid to make a change, almost always it is worth the effort.

[sonofsanta]

Great review, thanks. As an ex-Progresso admininstrator/user, I think 'competent' is a good description. One thing missing from the comments is pricing. When I worked with progresso, we were a new free school growing every year. As a result price was very important and I managed to push the price per pupil, per year to what I thought was very low. We did look at migrating from Progresso, especially when we got new heads in to primary and secondary. When we compared licensing fees between Advanced Learning and say SIMS and iSAMS, the difference over a 5 years was very significant. SIMS migration costs were frightening! Did you see much difference on licensing fees?

 

My big take-away from the last year of MIS migration updates on Edugeek, is don't be afraid to make a change, almost always it is worth the effort.

 

 

I can't remember the pricing specifically--the Head dealt with that aspect and just kept me informed, though from my perspective an MIS is too important to base the decision on price and I'd have argued for a pricier option if I thought it was better--but I think SIMS was far and away the more expensive, something like 25-30% more, and the others were all similar too each other; but then, of course, you have to account for third party services you might need, and so Bromcom (already competitive on price) became the cheapest option as well as the best. Everybody I spoke to who had been in the demos (SLT, Exams, Pastoral, HR, Finance...) independently said they liked Bromcom best, so that it worked out the cheapest too was very happy coincidence.

[Mr.Ben]

Hi Jackie.

 

We are a Primary only MAT with 33 schools and use ScholarPack as our MIS.

 

Happy to talk through what it offers.

 

Ben.

[supportman]

We are secondary grammar and Bromcom seems to be the way to go. Would be good to hear experiences of Bromcom having never really seen it.

 

We are a grammar and recently moved to Bromcom, loving it so far. Much better than Sims in my opinion.

 

iSams is also worth checking out as it has some overlap with grammer schools on the admissions side of things.