SAM

Just starting out

Kommentare: My experience has been great so far, I am able to navigate and find what I am looking for with minimal problems.

Vorteile:

This software is going to allow us to go simi-paperless, it has so many areas for us to utilize.

Nachteile:

Nothing - at this time I am still in the "learning" stage.

Wanted this to work.....

Kommentare: It was extremely frustrating. They need a base system that actually works and that you can customize as you go. They desperately need someone in management who is a teacher...not a developer. There is little to no skill in the ability to actually teach people how to use this system.

Vorteile:

The end product has some great functionality. There is product support but you are paying for services that should be included in onboarding. They expressed that some companies pay for 6-12 months before the software is even usable.

Nachteile:

There is no. "basic" system in place....meaning you cannot use the software in any capacity until you as the owner learn a massive amount of backend jargon, platforms, loading etc. It was a NIGHTMARE. After 4 months of literally banging our heads against the way we cancelled and lost thousands of dollars. The system itself is pretty good....the set up is a nightmare. Every time there is an issue you are paying hourly for someone to sit and ramble at you and not actually complete the task at hand. We never gained any functional system after the 4 months....yet we were paying a monthly fee for a set up that was unusable as well as hundreds of dollars a month for "consultations:

SAM Review

Kommentare: SAM is an excellent tool for marketing and grant writing. The staff enjoy the ease of use.

Vorteile:

Ease of Use is the biggest and most important feature in a program for our agency.

Nachteile:

When auto actions change without a change being made by our admin staff.

SAM has made our agency more efficient and better performing!

Kommentare: Social Workers in my agency love SAM. Before switching to SAM, we struggled to get basic data entered into our database as a result were unable to produce any meaningful data for our leadership and board. Since implementing SAM for our agency, we have not only increased data entry compliance but have expanded the data we collect to enable us to create complex reports, helping us make better agency decisions. We have even created a Family portal where families have their own web-based for and are able to upload documents and/or fill out data that is directly entered into SAM, thus managing part of their case. This has decreased the time it takes to get a family ready for adoption by almost 45%. Using SAM has made our agency more efficient and better performing.

Vorteile:

I love SAM! It is intuitive, easy to learn. It has a simple and clean user interface. As an administer, organizing the data entry experience for my end user, is straightforward and uncomplicated. A database admin, even someone with little to no experience with databases, can learn SAM quickly and create a custom database that is tailored for their agency that matches their agency's processes. It is very evident that the developers of SAM put in a lot of thought into what the end user was going to experience. Overall I recommend SAM for any social service agency wanting to increase their data collection and provide their workers with a simple, clean and easy to use database experience.

Nachteile:

As much as I love SAM, there are some areas that have room for improvement. Reporting is limited to simple spreadsheet data lists with counts, averages and min/max calculations. There is no graph creation or complex data analytics. And SAM cannot link to data analytic software either. However, you can export reports to excel to create graphs and for use in BI analytics.

A custom SAM for us

Vorteile:

I feel like the most valuable part of SAM is how easy it is to customize for the subscriber. Taking the time to learn how to build in SAM is really an investment into the software, and the more work I put into it, the more work it does for my agency. InReach Solutions hosts webinars frequently and even if I am not able to attend the live event they are a great resource to fall back on when I have a specific question that needs answering. If I ever find that I am unable to resolve my question through watching the webinars or reading the FAQ's answers on the website I know that I can always send an email with my question and either schedule a phone call, or receive my answer directly in email form.

Nachteile:

I wish that there were more options for Template Building or a better interface with existing fill-able PDFs. We tend to have many forms provided by the State that they do not accept in any other fashion so our clients must fill these out by hand and then a worker has to input the information after the fact. If we were able to upload the State's PDF and set the fields to be fill-able with coordinating SAM Fields it would be ideal.