Does your school still use SIMS & FMS?

Does your school still use SIMS & FMS? Do you know exactly where you are up to with it?

For many years, Capita SIMS & FMS remained the most popular MIS & Finance system in use

across thousands of schools. As technology rapidly advanced and schools desired a web based

option so they could move away from Windows desktops and adopt more flexible ways of

working with Apple iPad, Mac and Chromebooks in the classrooms. This MIS & Finance system

market was quickly being shaken up with schools migrating away from SIMS & FMS to solutions

such as Arbor, Bromcom, RM & Scholarpack along with the various finance options available

from Access, Civica, Iris & iSAMS among others.

There are many schools who have not been able to afford to migrate away and have made the

decision to remain with ESS SIMS / FMS which is still hosted in school on a physical server and

relies on Windows client access. To be fair to ESS, since they took over from Capita they have

very quickly started to catch up with the next generation of SIMS. There are many SIMS

Support providers who aren't encouraging schools to retire the on site servers and help them

migrate to the ‘connected’ option along with teacher access to registers etc via the SNG (SIMS

Next Gen) option.

I have worked with many schools on a wide variety of options from migrating to Arbor,

Scholarpack & RM and some still remaining on SIMS / FMS. I work closely with an amazing

SIMS support provider whose service is honest and transparent with everything they do. They

have enabled us to work with schools to get the best from SIMS & FMS and are now in the final

stages of retiring on premise servers to work 100% cloud hosted with the ‘Connected’ option.

This has enabled them with the use of SNG over the past two years to move away from

Windows PC’s for teaching staff over to iPad, Macbooks & Chromebooks. The handful of Admin

users still have Windows PC’s at this time but planning is in place to move those away from

Windows PC’s too in the future.

My concern is that not all SIMS support providers are not providing the support and advice that

they are being paid to do. One school I work with in the North West contacted me very

concerned that the their SIMS support provider were recommending the following actions:

● Purchase a new on site SIMS server due to insufficient storage space

● Pay for a larger backup package as they had exceeded the 50gb limit (over £600 extra

per year) - a deadline of 31st October was given. (Just as they were closing for ½ term

break)

With the free assistance of my trusted SIMS support provider, it was discovered that the schools

support provider hadn’t done any of the house keeping that they should do on the SIMS Server.

This made the used up storage to be more than it should be and created larger backups as a

result. There were many other issues that were discovered too. After a series of data cleansing

and removing other large batches of historical data that wasn’t required. The Server was

running much more efficiently and the backups were now well under the 50gb limit. An email

has been sent to the existing provider requesting they address the other outdated items as amatter of priority. As part of the conversation with this school, they didn’t have any knowledge of

SIMS Next Generation or the Connected option either. The provider simply wanted to keep the

school locked into the old way of doing things and sell them more hardware in the process. The

issues they contacted the school about could have been avoided had they done due diligence

and done their part correctly as well as providing honest and transparent advice to the school.

The school is now seriously considering giving notice to the existing provider and moving over

to the trusted partner I work with.

Honesty is the best policy. I firmly believe in not biting off the hand that feeds. The business

manager of this school gave me feedback about this saying that she doesn’t understand any of

this and can only work with the advice given by support providers. The fact that we have

exposed another example of bad practice has shown that not all support providers cannot be

trusted.

My honest advice to you if you’re still using an on premise server for SIMS & FMS. If you don’t

have any information about all the options you have moving forward and you are experiencing

anything like the example above. Please call them out on it and don’t be frightened of canceling

your agreement with them. There are some amazing support providers out there, the best you can choose at the moment is Pennine Education Ltd.