jjjonny
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About jjjonny
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I will heed your advice
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We'd rather have the challenge of doing it ourselves We work heavily with DB services and integration so I'm sure our core skill-set is more than adequate to achieve our desired goal. Yes @matt40k it is a great premium service for caterers which (when compared to the alternative systems) provides excellent value, usability and flexibility. Thanks to everyone for the help and advice. We'll be sure to let you know which approach we go with, and how it pans out.
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Think of it like this. Caterer - they signup for and use our system to manage school meal pre-orders. School - they have to get pupil data to the caterer for booking and parent account purposes. Current solution - school generates a report that isn't usually in the correct format so it's fiddly for the caterer to edit and then upload Proposed solution - a reporting script that allows schools to generate a report that has a consistent structure that is then easier to either a) upload to the system or b) send directly to the system using a piped curl or similar.
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I was also highlighting the fact that SIMS integration IS NOT our main USP, it's just something that would make the system easier to use from both a school and caterer perspective.
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@matt40k is saying SIMS integration would be of no interest to a catering company - I disagree. Your saying it would only be of interest if we were selling the system directly to schools? correct?
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Your making very specific assumptions based on the little information I've provided about our system.
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All of the above points have been factored into our solution - but I can see why it would appear that a pre-order is potentially inflexible.
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I'm not sure why home ordering is 'inflexible'. From our research parents of younger children would rather be in control of what they are eating vs the pupil picking for themselves. Picking in the school is also a waste of time and resources.
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@matt40k that isn't our USP (please see my previous message). Your advice is interesting, but not relevant to our system.
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SIMS integration is a 'nice to have' not a necessity within our system. We've already been advised by SIMS that the schools can export and provide the data to us. It would just be 'cleaner' to have an export tool that ensures a consistent data structure within the exports. When you say 'Are you aware the school buys the integration?' what do you mean?
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@matt40k out of interest do you work for one of our potential competitors (wisepay, parentpay, parentmail, etc)?
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We've done extensive research into the competition. Analysis of fees for 'typical' small and large school catering companies. We're able to offer significant saving to the caters, and a better user experience for parents. Thanks for the advice though @matt40k
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Thank you both for the speedy responses! Ok I'll definitely stay away from direct access to the DB. We'll probably go down the route of creating a 'sync script' the school can run to pull out the data as XML in a format our system can handle. I'll have a read through the links provided and see the best way to go about this.
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Hi everyone! Firstly I'd just like to say I'm new to the forum so I apologise if I'm asking anything that has been posted about many times before. I'm currently part of a team developing a school meal pre-order system. As part of that system we'd like to offer schools pupil data synchronisation from their SIMS service. We're not particularly keen to enrol in the SIMS partner program as it's way off cost for us as an early stage startup. With that in mind I was wondering if anyone could provide any information regarding how to connect to, and get data from the SIMS system (eg. do we have to connect directly to the MSSQL DB with a user that has access to relevant pupil tables)? Any help, or pointers would be much appreciated!