maxbradley

We moved 6 schools over summer, and then another school over Easter and I'd second everything mentioned above. One additional consideration; Parentpay, if you use it, takes 2 weeks-1 month to transition to the new MIS, and this timer starts once you have your new MIS and can create the TP user in Bromcom (All other TP systems are about a week, I'm sure it's just a coincidence that Parentpay makes this so difficult). This can be a problem if you have a large influx of new students like in September, none of whom will be in Parentpay. However, if you do the move in Easter, you won't have that influx. All the students that were in before the move stay there, so you'll only have an issue with the few students that join/leave in the first weeks of the summer term.

We moved 2 secondaries and 4 primaries over summer 2023. Because of the amount of schools wanting to do similar, we didn't have choice over what days or how many schools would be moved. We were told to get the data from SIMS to them on X day, and we'd get the live systems back 2 weeks later. I believe you'll have a bit more flexibility at Easter. One thing to bear in mind is how long it takes your third-party systems to adjust to your new MIS. You won't be able to give them the details they need to connect to Bromcom until you have your live system, so this will add to the time your full system is out of action. Wonde is really good, they will have reoriented to Bromcom in 3 days, but Catering systems can take longer (and can cost a lot) and parentpay takes ages, about a month for us. Since the parentpay delay will only affect new starters, existing students will already have been synced across, this would be a big advantage to moving at Easter. RE permissions, we made sure that the few (~2) users in a school with the admin permission knew not to make any other users admins. Admins can change the roles of other users, and letting that get out of hand could rapidly lead to everyone having every permission. We also manage the actual roles themselves centrally, but admins can give any role (except admin) to any user as they see fit.

I had thought the same thing. However, the kitchens in the primaries are provided by the council and they use Cypad, which only integrates with ParentPay.

We (A 6 school MAT) moved from SIMS to Bromcom last summer. Overall the move was pretty straightforward, make sure you've got the migration of any third party systems you use scheduled out. You'll need to create third party users in Bromcom system for any automated data transfers, which can only be done once you've received your live systems. Most apps connect via Wonde or Groupcall, and migrating those was very straightforward, they needed 3 days once we gave them the TP user and were fine. Catering providers can be a challenge, and may also charge a fee for the migration, so speak to them early. ParentPay was our biggest problem by far. 1 week after the migration all the schools came back and PP hadn't completed their work to use the new MIS, and started talking about how the migration takes 14 days, something that was never mentioned in previous discussions. The fact that PP is an ESS product is certainly just a coincidence. Regarding the quality of Bromcom as opposed to SIMS; We're happy with it. I cannot imagine any heavy user of the MIS saying they miss SIMS and want to go back. It has areas of difficulty that are discussed in other threads so I won't go into here, but I've found the benefits to outweigh that, and am reasonably confident that the company is responsive to these issues.

I'd be interested to hear where you found discrepancies in your data migration Chris. We've received our test systems with school data moved into them prior to the actual migration this summer. I haven't found any discrepancies, but it's obviously such a huge area to cover it would be good to know where there might be issues. If I were to boil the result of our procurement exercise down into a sentence or two, it would be something like this; The Bromcom system seems to have the most potential, but the Arbor sales team inspires more confidence. I would guess that you'd get the best overall system through Bromcom and a fair amount of hard work, but you could get a decent system up and running most easily with Arbor. The usual caveats apply; we've gone with Bromcom and haven't completed the migration yet, so this opinon comes from viewing countless demos, rather than working with both the systems long-term.

Hi All, We're in the process of migrating to Bromcom. I've been going through all the thid-party services we use and making sure they will work with Bromcom. I had been assuming that anything that connected via Wonde would move to the new MIS quite happily, but Vericool, a cashless catering provider, have said that it will take a day and cost us £750+VAT. While the cost is annoying, I'm more worried that if we go ahead with the migration, loads of services will turn around and charge us before their service starts working with the new MIS. Can anyone who has migrated to any MIS confirm if this was the norm with a Wonde migration, or is Vericool just atypical? Thanks in advance!

We're in the process of moving over and using GCloud to do so. Definitely brush up on the GCloud provisions before you begin because the MIS you speak to will not necessarily make the process compliant if you don't. You'll need to do a search of the GCloud database and pursue all the results. You don't want to go through the process with Arbor, Bromcom and Compass and get to the end to discover that Ed:Gen exists as well, and they need to be fairly evaluated. I'd also recommend building in opportunities for staff to contribute to the procurement process. We did demo days that anyone could attend, and collected feedback, then we did focus groups to gauge ease-of-use. The upshot is that it feels more of a collaborative move than a change mandated from on high, you will actually generate useful insight, and the salespeople of the respective MIS are probably much better at selling their MIS than you might be. As Chris said above, cost won't be the deciding factor partly because there are benefits in users time to using a new system, but also because a newer MIS will likely replace more than just SIMS. There is an ecosystem of third-party services that give SIMS cloud-like functionalities (e.g. ClassCharts) and you're likely using some of these. A new MIS will replace these as well, so the price should take into account all of the services it replaces, not just SIMS.

I got the call last week (or rather, intercepted it). My plan was to feign ignorance and get a feel for how pushy they were being, whether they detailed the downsides (the extension) along with the upsides (the price cut). In fairness to them, I think they were about as transparent as you'd expect a salesperson to be. That said, I told them we weren't happy about the last 3 year contract debacle and wouldn't be getting ourselves into another one. The truth of course is that we don't expect to be using SIMS by then.

Our CFO has been getting reminders (for every school) to; "We would encourage you to please log-on, to review the information presented, to discuss this where necessary with colleagues and to complete the process promptly." Alongside an (extended) deadline of 10th March. Completing the process as far as I can tell means approving a new contract with lower rates but a new 3 year term, so ending in 2026 not 2025. The difference in rates is lower than the cost of an additional year. I spoke to support on the portal, who said that there is no way to reject this contract, it can only be accepted, or allowed to run out of time. Therefore, I'm advising our CFO to let the timer run down, but it obviously seems like risky advice. Is anyone else receiving these emails and am I understanding this right? If yes, this seems like dodgy practice on the part of ESS, this approach feels like schools could be pressured into extending their contracts without understanding that that is what they're doing. If I'm not, and there is a way to lock in the lower prices without extending the contract, please let me know.

So if granted this year break clause, would that begin from the signing of the 3 year contract, so March last year, or from the date of it being granted, so March this year? And are you able to trigger your break with a 90 day advance notice at any time within that year or would it simply terminate at the end of the year? Thanks in advance,

Sorry if this has been asked before. If it has I haven't found it. How is the support for your MIS? For those who are, like me, looking for a new MIS, a frank discussion of the quality of support could be helpful. My experience of Bromcom support My current MAT is looking for a new MIS, but I previously worked a lot with Bromcom. Your options for support ther are a web chat, a phone line, and you can also raise tickets yourself. When I started there shortly after we moved to Bromcom (beginning of 2021) the support was really good. The chat support was really helpful and I got a good grasp of the MIS quickly by speaking to them regularly. This was essential because I didn't find the training material to be great, a lot of 3 hour seminar recordings that had very little content for the amount of time involved. I think they got wise to the fact that their support staff were spending a lot of time training or resolving common/simple issues, because they improved the quality of the training material, but the support staff also became more willing to write issues up as tickets or refer you to the materials/ the phonelines (web chat is for simpler issues, phones for more complex ones, though I don't think this is stated anywhere). Fair enough, really. My only comment on this is that it isn't applied consistently, some staff would always commit to solve your issue there and then, whereas others were much more likely to write up a ticket or refer you elsewhere, but that isn't a major problem. Occasionally tickets would fall between the cracks and you'd need to chase a response. In my experience, these tended to be questions for which there is no good solution, and I'd appreciate support being more willing to say that than let the ticket languish. That said, I'd get an update if I asked for it. Overall I'd rate Bromcom support pretty highly.