ashleighbrown

I haven't experienced Arbor as I came into my current role where our Trust had already moved to Bromcom, where in my previous school we were using SIMS so I can't comment on Arbor which I know is the entire point of the post so apologies I'm not particularly answering your initial question but just wanted to comment on my experience with Bromcom. The difference between SIMS and Bromcom is light-years apart, it's really refreshing to see how much is invested into constant developments and updates, I'm particularly interested to see what comes from the upcoming timetabling updates. I also think it is great that Bromcom have the ideas portal where users can suggest developments that would be beneficial for users. We also really value how flexible MCAS is, and the adaptability of the reports and PowerBI intergration. At the Trust level, Vision is great for ensuring everything is consistent between schools and it is hugely beneficial being able to push things out into each school's Bromcom like assessment sheets and roles and permissions to reduce the time spent recreating the exact same information between sites.

This was a really interesting insight into how far cloud computing has come in the past couple of decades - it's astonishing to me that some MIS still haven't moved forward from the first phase of cloud application offerings despite how far cloud services have actually come since then, especially since other sectors seem to have had no issues in keeping current. Although I do agree with some of the other comments about performance of core functions and reporting speed needing to also be a priority with development, I also am very intrigued to see how Bromcom AI will develop in the coming months. When I first heard it was in the works I was initially very apprehensive, particularly about all staff having access to such a powerful tool but after familiarising myself with it more I'm definitely coming round to the idea and of course Bromcom roles and permissions can be used to only enable it for the staff we want to have access to it, so it will be very interesting to see how it develops!

I came into my current post after our Trust had already previously switched MIS to Bromcom, so although I missed the original switchover period I was still very apprehensive about learning a new MIS. I had previously been so used to SIMS and had never heard of Bromcom so was worried about learning a whole new system on top of taking on a new job role. I thought I would struggle and it would take a huge amount of time to learn how to use the system, however I found this was not the case at all and consider myself to be quite a proficient user now! I found all the training and guides really useful, and on top of this, the processes are intuitive and easy to navigate, so much so that you can work things out for yourself without needing the guides. Not only this, it's so much nicer to have a modern MIS as opposed to the archaic SIMS design, which I know is just really a quality of life aesthetic improvement, but it makes a lot of difference!