Are You Considering Migrating to Digital Report Generation?

Here are some few tips that may help.

1. First is to determine if you want an Online or Offline system.

Online systems require monthly or yearly subscription fees to keep them running.

This continuous running cost is the major disadvantage for Online systems.

Otherwise, it can be very robust and has a major advantage of being accessible from anywhere in the world or with any device.

It has other various advantages and disadvantages.

For a school that doesn't have issues shelling out 100s of thousands of Naira or more yearly for it's maintenance, they are usually a good investment. Best for Richer Schools.

Offline systems requires usually only one time purchase payment, so you do not need to pay for maintenance of the system periodically.

This is the major advantage for offline systems, especially ones that requires little to no maintenance.

Although they are not as robust as online systems, they get the job done while saving the school a lot of cost.

This is best for moderate income schools and starter Schools.

Are you a Cost conscious School?

Trying to find a good balance between operations cost and quality service delivery?

Go Offline till your school is stable enough to manage the regular and always rising maintenance cost of running online Result Systems.

Minimum cost range for the most basic of Online Result Systems is between 150k - 180k per annum.

For most schools, it's easy to pay such amount in the first year,
1. Because it was planned for and budgeted. And of course
2. the initial excitement of obtaining a new system for the school which masks the pain of any cost incurred.

Challenges are in the 2nd and 3rd year, when such cost are usually not remembered to be budgeted for, or there's a realization that the cost may be on the high side and the excitement effect has long waned away.

Funds that can be injected into other more pressing school needs...

Teacher/staff Salaries, purchase of new school furnitures, School vehicles maintenance, Laboratories maintenance, repair works etc.

Now it becomes an issue considering the opportunity costs.

At this point, it's now Considered a Terrible investment judgement call..

Are you about to make similar mistake?

After I've opted for an Offline System, What next

What to consider when choosing an offline system and vendor

1. I will make sure to check if the final output of the Result Generated meets my school requirement.. this is very important.

Careful study of the sample reports provided by the vendor(s) is made to ascertain which has elements of information that's required by my school.

Go over all the different samples available, and decide which ones best is suited.

2. I will consider the systems available flexibility options.

Here contact is made with the vendor to request adjustments to the Report interface.

I will also consider the Gradescale, removal of pupil/Student position, inclusion of any other parameters. Will also consider it's handling of scores in decimals, Percentage appearance and overall Grading and Accuracy of all computations

3. Subject capacity, Student capacity.
Ease of use, training and any other requirements will be of interest.

4. System Costs, mode of Installation, mode of training and other cost implication.

5. Availability of vendor.

6. any other questions or assurances..

Hot tip

No system is perfect.

Every now and then, every system would require some level of intervention from the vendors until the users have had sufficient experience utilizing the system.

This vendor intervention defers from school to school, depending on the skill level of those handling the system in the different schools.

Because of this, it's important that the vendor should be easily accessible or Available as the need requires.

If the vendor is physically available, they may require to cover their cost to/fro the school at some point. So please always consider that.

For Vendors that operate remotely, reaching their customers remotely, this extra service may come at zero cost. Depends on vendor.

Usually, the cost of such intermittent intervention has been built into the one time cost of the System purchased.

That's why it's important to pay a reasonable amount for the one-time purchase cost.

Beware of one time payment cost less than N20K at minimum.. because, it won't be worth the vendors time to cater to your intervention requirements as the needs arise, therefore you may not really enjoy using the system.

So many Schools are abandoning their School Management Portal.

The challenges are much.

Dependence on a system you have very little control over is very daunting.

Sometimes, the challenges are of no fault of the developers.

The internet as we know it, is constantly being updated and upgraded.. forcing Internet Companies to change along with it to Remain relevant.

Codes that worked seamlessly before starts to become problematic because of these frequent internet updates.

Portals then as a consequence misbehave at Critical times. Tending to be highly unreliable like Nepa, (Goes off and on at will, regardless of whose business or economy depends on it).

Because these Portal Services are largely hosted by International Companies, subscription for their services are usually paid in Dollars. Therefore constant increases in exchange rates affects the general cost of maintaining and running such systems.

Portals because of the above have generally become unreliable or relatively very expensive to run and maintain.

Reason why so many Schools are abandoning them.