SIMS to Bromcom routines pre migration- Checking and Cleansing?

[William1]

All schools/trusts that have migrated talk about all the data cleansing and checks they do pre-migration and everyone has said they had spent a significant amount of time on it. I am struggling to find anything that can document what needs to be undertaken. It would also be useful to know any sims reports that need to be undertaken to prepare this data.- So effectively a checklist can be made. I started making a hybrid document from other MIS providers (that I understand would need Sims to be checked and cleansed before going to their MIS) together with suggestions from Bromcom..

 

Obviously we want clean data in our system but what have people found if these processes have not been carried out (not that I am saying we will do this),what would happen if you didn't do any routines on the data before it went to Bromcom?

 

Any help would be appreciated.

[supportman]

We just confirmed all parents, student and staff details were correct. That was enough really.

 

Valid parents emails is an important one as they are used by MCAS for the parent portal.

 

You end up making reports in a different way and using inbuilt features a lot with Bromcom so its quite different (and better) than Sims.

 

For that reason you don't really need to sanitize too many things outside the core data.

 

You also get a practice Database for a couple of weeks to look at. This helped us a lot with confidence that we had our data migrated acurately.

Edited May 16, 2024 by supportman

[Linfit]

Agree - focus on the basic areas, especially contacts. We had a lot of legacy stuff where the contact information had not recorded consistently - so for example, the Grandma's phone number recorded as a note in the phone number of a parent rather than as a separate contact, or contact being recorded as "Nan" with no actual name.

We also had contacts not correctly flagged as PR, or requiring correspondence, phones not flagged as Mobiles, stuff like that. We found issues because having these correct is really important for the built in comms in Bromcom to work properly.

 

Because we didn't use SIMS for comms we didn't really appreciate how inconsistent our contact data was, a lot of it being inherited crud from primary CTF files.

 

Personally, I took the opportunity to clean up things like the Staff list and deleted a lot of staff who had left years ago - needed a special DB patch for this which I got from our support unit.

 

We also made a deliberate decision to not migrate any attached documents. We exported them out but only re-imported SEN passports and some medical stuff, the majority, which were old termly reports, we did not migrate.

I did dump out a load of Summary marksheets so that we had an assessment history for our current students. We set up a new assessment framework in Bromcom but were then able to pull in the last years data relatively easily

[AlistairB1983]

We just confirmed all parents, student and staff details were correct. That was enough really.

Valid parents emails is an important one as they are used by MCAS for the parent portal.

You end up making reports in a different way and using inbuilt features a lot with Bromcom so its quite different (and better) than Sims.

For that reason you don't really need to sanitize too many things outside the core data.

You also get a practice Database for a couple of weeks to look at. This helped us a lot with confidence that we had our data migrated acurately.

We migrated to Arbor over Easter and, despite managing to time my paternity leave particularly well to cover the actual 'go-live' date, I was heavily involved in a lot of the data tidy up/checking prior to and post launch.

 

As suggested above, a check and trim of parent, student & staff data will go a very long way in making your transition smoother. Assuming the Bromcom practice site works similarly to how the one for Arbor did, you can then go through and work out any areas which haven't migrated properly. So for us we had a couple of issues with regards to timetabling that, whilst easy to fix, just needed adding to a 'to-do' list of jobs to complete once the 'proper' site went live.

 

Helpfully Arbor gave us a workbook to go through which helped us keep tabs on which bits of data had been correctly migrated (e.g student numbers, SEN numbers, PP numbers, EAL numbers etc.) and after that it was down to staff to check the practice site and flag any inconsistencies.

[garbage46]

If you don't have them start collecting email addresses for those with parental responsibility. For those that you do have, make sure they're linked to the correct contact record and not the pupil record. As mentioned above this will be worthwhile for MCAS.

 

Make a note of your UDFs and any unsual fields you use in SIMS. We have a few schools that store contact date of birth, not sure why, but that isn't a field in Bromcom so we needed to create a UDF. I used the API to bulk import these. If you're that way inclined I recommended getting connected with the API for extracting and POSTing data.

 

Our biggest issue is enrolment history. It wasn't included in the migration and we have lots of managed moves across our LA. It's still a bit a mess we need to unpick.

[bobsmith]

I second that - dual roll history was a royal pain in the ass - make a report in your current MIS and then manually enter them after you go live.

 

Alternatively I think you can get around it by exporting CTFs including the "school history" and then reimporting them and set to import ONLY school history.