At Bromcom, we are known for innovation & ground-breaking partnerships, and our recent collaboration with Coventry City Council is no different. Together, we were able to migrate 45 of their 60 schools from SIMS to our own solution in a 3-week period – one of the largest projects of its kind ever undertaken in the UK.
Following the success of this project, we wanted to take a look into the key factors behind the change, the benefits Bromcom has provided & some thoughts from Coventry themselves.
"Our partnership with Bromcom has been game changing, a breath of fresh air. From start to finish, the process was smoother than I could have hoped for, and we are now in a place where all our schools are collaborating and helping each other, rather than depending solely on our support"
What prompted the change?
Our partnership with Coventry City Council began in May 2022, when Bromcom emerged as the winner of a robust procurement process. Systems lead, Ollie Burnett, was the leading figure from the Local Authority and we worked together to ensure the project was a success.
When presenting to an audience at our annual Shard event in June this year, Ollie stated the need to provide direction to their maintained schools, who were considering their options due to inflexible future contracts being offered by SIMS. Schools with the capacity to move then unanimously voted in favour of a procurement process led by the local authority (LA).
A key part of the process for Ollie was to ensure each school were heard and had representation throughout. This culminated in a ‘working party’ of users being formed and submitting individual scores for each tender to EverythingICT, who recommended Bromcom’s One-Stop Shop solution as the best option.
Once Bromcom was selected, our tailored training and onboarding process meant Schools attended training together at reduced cost and subsequently require less ongoing support. We also provided numerous on-site setup visits at no cost and bespoke webinar sessions for key areas like Behaviour/Census.
The benefits of Bromcom
Coventry has a young population which places an even higher-than-usual emphasis on schools. Through our collaboration with Coventry, we have been able to collectively enhance everyday life and work for teachers, pupils, and schools throughout the city.
All 45 maintained schools in the LA have benefited from increases in efficiency and improved day-to-day operations since implementing Bromcom’s systems.
Schools within the city are now taking advantage of the cloud-based nature to enable teachers to take registers and access key information about students when they are out on school trips.
It has also had a positive impact upon staff as they can now work from anywhere, which was not possible during the Covid-19 pandemic. Staff can complete key admin tasks and have access to up-to-date data to help inform their lesson plans outside of the school.
Many Coventry Schools used SIMS before, which is a local application, and its performance would vary depending on each machine requiring lengthy updates, while our cloud updates are carried out periodically and do not affect our users in any capacity.
"Each school will have certain parts of Bromcom they use more, but overall Bromcom’s one-stop shop solution means we have saved money across the board on third party bolt-ons because everything is built in! To sum it up, the unanimous feeling is that, if we went back in time, we would choose Bromcom again"
