ProcessFlow School Management

System

A Day in the life of SMJK Dindings

“The Right Data for the Right People at the Right Time”

ProcessFlow School Management System is an educational ERP

suite and other critical educational management applications
This paper contains case studies of the adoption of ProcessFlow School Management Systems
(SMS) in SMJK Dindings, a Malaysian Chinese Conforming Secondary School in Lumut, Perak,
Malaysia. It highlights the various administrative principles, planning, implementation, successes
and challenges in the deployment of the SMS. The case studies will interest educational
administrators planning the adoption of SMS. Each case study provided insights into the different
aspects of school administrations and management.

The School now considers the SMS to be of strategic importance, given the School’s special
interest in using technology to provide teaching and learning as well as administrative services
to students, parents as well as school districts reporting.
Student Centric – Student Life Cycle
The concept of designing a Student Life Cycle is about providing students with ‘electronic progress
points’ with the schools, as they progress through their education experience and through school life.

Principal – Mr Tiong Ting Ming

The tasks of managing school involves working with information and building
on teaching ideas collaboratively. The efficiency and effectiveness of this
management task can be enhanced significantly through the use of
technology. Teachers in my school had been given intensive trainings to equip
them to manage the new facilities, technologies and methodologies deployed
in the past few years.

How he deals with Change Management

“You are having people adjust to a different way of doing tasks," says Tiong.
"Since the introduction of SMS, we had been giving special training and
briefing session to teachers at all levels, from novice users; to teachers who
are already fluent in ICT operations from our various continuing ICT training
programs conducted both during and after school hours. The key
characteristic in my school is the consistency with which our teachers, having
agreed to a school policy, apply it”

To Keep the Kids in School

Internet use had become a part of our students' daily routines, in part
because today's children have grown up with computers. Computers are
integrated into their communication habits and are used to help students work
more efficiently.

“Whatever the system, it is only as good as the management follow-up; a

point emphasised by Tiong; once the kids are attending school again, it's vital
to keep them. “Managing behavior was most effective in areas that linked to
efforts to improve attitudes to learning and attainment,” says Tiong. We Keep
the computers on after schools and allow the kids full access," he said. "It's
got to be a school that the kids want to come to learn and study. Nobody ever
mentions that."

Internet Monitoring - Keeps Students Online and In-Line

Even though the school is practicing a totally open access for students and
staff to the Internet for learning resources and knowledge, he also need to
safeguard the school network from abuse, while protecting the students who
use the Internet for legitimate study purposes. With the help of the Internet
Monitoring module in SMS; Tiong is able to monitor Internet activities on his
school’s network, including email sent and received and web sites visited.
“Web access in school has a dark side, when Internet use becomes Internet
abuse,” says Tiong.

The module communicates network activity through online reports that

provide details such as the top Internet users on the school network and the
amount of time they spend online. Furthermore, reports show the most
frequented Web sites visited, e-mail transactions, top virus and spam mail
received and will also contain the Instant Messaging traffic in the future.

The Internet Monitoring

data provide in-depth
analysis of students' on-line
activities including the
restoration of e-mail, site
visited and pages visited on
the SMS.

"I'm not Big Brother," says

Tiong. "I am just making
sure that the school
network is used for what it
was originally intended -
helping kids learn."
Costing Resource Managements Modules
The SMS also has incorporated a series of Costing Resource Management
modules like Call Billing Monitoring and Print Accounting modules. We are
able to track which phone extensions made the most calls in and out of
the schools, who usually stays on the phone for a long time and which
department made the most outstation calls.

With Print Accounting, we give credit points to all students in the school at
the beginning of the month, as students print on any of the school’s
networked printers connected to the Samba server, the SMS Print
Accounting will automatically debit his credit points. Students who finished
his credit points before month end will need to pay for the extra printings.
The Print Accounting also inserted the user’s ID on every pages of the
printout; this way, we can monitor which user had left a pile of
uncollected printouts with the printers.

Data Mining – Performance Analysis

The SMS had been in operation in the school for almost two years, with
the volume of data currently available, Tiong can now start to perform all
sorts of Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) functions like analysis on
examination results by class, level, subjects, year or race. He can also
choose to perform analysis on Library data like the number or type of
books read; so that decisions can be made to purchase the right number
of books for each category in the coming school year. Starting 2005, he
will be working on getting the attendance record analysed, looking for
patterns, to know which of the age groups and family background of
students that usually skip schools.

Data Mining – Behavior Management

These Data Mining functions provide a new chance to develop behavior
policies and management strategies in schools, based on hard data," says
Tiong. "For you to effectively teach, you need to know what triggers
certain types of behavior and what is disengaging children from
learning ... not what you think you know but what you actually know”

“Since we started using the SMS, we have found it to be very powerful in

area of behavior studies; the bigger picture is beginning to emerge,
outlining fascinating trends. We are now making decisions affecting the
curriculum and other areas based on up to date information," says Tiong.
"To us, it is the Right Data for the Right People at the Right Time”

On School Attendance Recording

While all the evidence indicates that school truancy is linked to
educational failure; collating the attendance information in a paper
register is an arduous task, evidence also shows that teachers need to
react to absences on the same day if they are to have any effect.

Tiong know that the most successful solutions would have ICT at the core.
The school had fitted a proximity-card e-attendance system for pilot run
for a year to all the staff; at the end of 2004, he installed the new RFID
readers to all the classrooms, library and science labs.

Previously, the teacher log-in to the SMS, calls up the class list and takes
the absence list; when the names have been called the teacher presses
the "submit" button, closes the folder and gets on with teaching.
However, Tiong is aware that the biggest impact was on internal truancy,
Kids were turning up, getting their attendance recorded and disappeared,"
said Tiong. "The RFID cards had a dramatic impact on that, since they
have to clock-in and out of the classroom"

The SMS e-attendance system would typically deliver an absentee report

minutes after the morning registration, and would allow the register to be
updated through the day. Initially, the main concerns about RFID cards
are the vulnerability of the readers to vandalism, alongside problems
caused by lost of forgotten cards and students clock in for others.

But we have severe punishment for vandalism in schools," says Tiong.

"And currently 96% of the kids are remembering to bring their cards
every day. merit points will be giving for student who report fraud clock-in
for others"
Student Profile Management – Student Activity Life Cycle
The Student Profile Management involves building an online repository for the school to store the
students’ personal information such as their mailing addresses, photographs and exam results. Coupled
with this “Personal Profile” information will be “Capability Profile” data that records students’ development
of generic attributes and skills. “Student Activity Life Cycle”

On Disciplinary Actions and Monitoring

Most teachers would assume that there was little that ICT could
offer in behavior management. But they would be wrong. In our
system, the obvious answer is to log behavior incidents so that you
can first see the patterns and then make the appropriate
management decisions. The Disciplinary module of the SMS goes
some way towards this and is specifically targeted on the problem;
it offers categories of misbehavior, from violent incidents to
smoking to talking out of turn. Teachers log incidents and the
software collates the information to allow us to see patterns, either
for the individual or the age group.

"Form 5 students were traditionally a difficult year group," says

Jones. "They had the highest number of incidents, but the least
number of students placed on report. Using the Disciplinary
module, we were able to identify that it is always the eight students
that were causing the problems. We've been able to work with
these eight and they have calmed down."

Another advantage of the system is the instant access and

reporting possibilities. This is especially useful when parents come
into school.

"The Form Teachers are finding that this information is invaluable,"

said Tiong "Parents often claim that it's a clash of personalities.
They say that one teacher is 'picking on' their son or daughter. But
we can show them the print-outs, and they can see that incidents
have been reported by several teachers."

On Open Source
The benefits of open source include cost savings, buyers typically
pay only for support, not for the software itself. There's also little of
the haggling over long-term licenses and upgrade rights that comes
with commercial software from Microsoft and other companies.
Additional applications are easy to plug in as schools grow.

Schools need to understand they will save on licensing costs, on

maintenance costs because of increased reliability, on security, and
on training costs for both technical staff who support the system
and for teachers and administrators who use them.

Looking Ahead
Since the implementation at SMJK Dindings is already completed
and had attracted so much attention, Tiong is now going out to
share his experiences with other educators and help to duplicate
existing resources for similar technical implementation, this time on
a much wider and bigger implementations. Working with a group of
Open Source system consultants, he is giving the on-the-ground
experiences in a day-to-day operations capacity.

“Our goal is to provide pragmatic information on our existing

implementation models that will facilitate decisions making for
these schools when they took on similar implementations.

He had been giving consulting views for a few Colleges and

International schools in rolling out their much bigger plan. He is
currently working with the SMJK School Council to implement
similar School solutions to all the 78 SMJK schools in the country, a
secondary school community with 120,000 student populations and
7,500 educators.
Systems at a Glance

Servers at a glance

School Management System
Dell Precision Workstation 650
Dual Xeon 3.06 GHz CPU
2GB ECC RAM
2 x 73GB 15K RPM SCSI HD
RedHat Enterprise Linux
Apache web server
PostgreSQL RDBMS
PHP scripts
OpenSSL
Proxy Server
Dell PowerVault 755
Dual Pentium III 1.0Ghz CPU
1GB ECC RAM
2x18GB 10KRPM SCSI (RAID 1)
3x73GB 10KRPM SCSI (RAID5)
RedHat Enterprise Linux
Squid and SquidGuard
Print and File Server
Dell PowerEdge 2800
Dual Intel Xeon 2.8GHz CPU
2GB RAM
8x36GB 10K RPM SCSI HD
RedHat Enterprise Linux
Samba 3.0 Print and File
LDAP/DNS/DHCP/BACKUP
Server
Dell PoweEdge 830
Pentium 4 3.0Ghz HT
2GB ECC RAM
2 x 80GB SATA HD
2 x 250GB SATA HD
RedHat Enterprise Linux
OpenLDAP
Email / Web Server (Cyberjaya)
Dell PowerEdge 2550
Dual Xeon 2.4 GHz CPU
1GB RAM
5 x 36GB SCSI (RAID 5)
RedHat Enterprise Linux
QMail, SpamAssasin, ClamAV Antivirus
Storage Server
Dell PowerVault 220S Storage
14 x 73GB 10KRPM SCSI HD
Firewall Server
IBM Personal Computer 300PL
Pentium III 400MHz CPU
192MB RAM
pfSense
(http://www.pfsense.com/)
Bootable CD Version

Personal Computers at a glance

Computer Lab 1 - Sapura Computer Lab 2- NetPrep Programming Lab – Form 4T / 5T

22 Dell Optiplex GX280 25 Dell Optiplex 170L 20 Dell Optiplex 170L
Intel Pentium 4 3.0Ghz /HT Intel Celeron 2.66Ghz Pentium 4 2.8Ghz CPU
1GB RAM 512MB RAM 512MB RAM
80GB SATA HD 40GB IDE HD 80GB HD
CD-ROM / Floppy CD-ROM / Floppy CD-ROM / Floppy
Administrative PCs Library Teaching / Learning
12 Dell Optiplex GX520/GX620 6 Dell Optiplex GX520/GX620 8 Unit Dell Latitude C640 Notebook
Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz /HT Pentium D 2.8Ghz / EM64T 2 Unit of IBM ThinkPad R40
1GB RAM 512MB RAM 1 Unit Apple iBook G4
80GB HD 80GB HD 2 Unit of IBM ThinkPad R41
CDRW-DVD Combo / Floppy CD-ROM / Floppy 8 Unit of Compaq Presario M2000

Network at a glance

LAN Backbone – Server Room WAN – TMNet Streamyx Enterprise 2.0MB

3Cm Core Builder 4007 Layer 3 Modular Switch (CORE) 2.0MB Downlink, 384K uplink
3Com SuperStack 4900 Layer 3 Switch 5 fixed IPs

LAN Backbone – Classroom Blocks

3Com SuperStack II 3900 24 / 36 Port WAN – SchoolNet 1.0MB
3Com AccessPoint 7250 1.0MB Downlink, 384 uplink

School Information at a glance

Web URL User Info Statistics Racial Percentage Contact Number

www.smjkdgs.edu.my Students: 870 Malay : 25% +605-6835670 - School Office
Teachers: 66 Chinese: 53% +605-6812118 - Principal Office
School Address Administrators: 23 Indian : 20% +605-6834617 - Teacher Room
SMJK Dindings Parent Access: 50 Others : 2%
32200 Pundut,
Lumut, Perak,
Malaysia.
Open-source Technologies implemented in the school
Open source is not just about cost savings, since the code is open, it offers the flexibility for organizations to
modify the code as needed for specific uses, open source can also provide superior security than closed source.
We had adopted the Open Source components since 1998 and had deployed in every part of our operations
and had since created a tightly integrated technology to run the ProcessFlow SMS suite of applications on
various hardware platforms

Linux is an open-source operating system within the Unix family. Because of its
robustness and availability, Linux has won popularity in the Open Source
community and among commercial application developers.

Apache Web Server is an open-source HTTP server for modern

operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of this product
is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP
services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

PostgreSQL is an advanced open-source database tool with sophisticated

object-relational database management system supporting almost all SQL
constructs, including transactions and user-defined types. PostgreSQL is able to
handle their most valuable data and mission critical applications.

PHP is an open-source, server-side HTML embedded scripting language

used to create dynamic Web, it is a widely-used general-purpose scripting
language that is especially suited for Web development and can be
embedded into HTML.

OpenSSL is an open-source implementation of the SSL (Secure

Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocols. OpenSSL
is used by Apache HTTP Server for https support and by PostgreSQL to
provide secure database access.

OpenLDAP an open-source implementation of the Lightweight Directory

Access Protocol. It provides a stand–alone LDAP server, a stand–alone
LDAP replication server, libraries implementing the LDAP protocol, and
other relevant software.

Qmail is a Linux/Unix mail transfer agent that, like a post office, collects mail
and figures out how to move it further along. It is a commonly used program on
the Internet for sending e-mail via the SMTP protocol.

Squid is a popular open source proxy webcache. It has a variety of uses,

from speeding up a web server by caching repeated requests, to caching we
b, DNS, and other network lookups for a group of people sharing network
resources. It is primarily designed to run on Unix-like systems.

ClamAV AntiVirus is a GPL anti-virus toolkit for UNIX. The main purpose of
this software is the integration with mail servers for attachment scanning.

SpamAssassin is an extensible email filter which is used to identify

spam. Once identified, the mail can then be optionally tagged as spam
for later filtering

Samba is a free software implementation of Microsoft's networking system. As of

version 3, samba not only provides file and print services for various
Microsoft Windows clients but can also provide domain services, either
as a Primary Domain Controller (PDC) or as a Backup Domain Controller.
It can also be part of an Active Directory domain

Shorewalls
The Shoreline Firewall, more commonly known as "Shorewall", is
a high-level tool for configuring Netfilter
 The Strength of the ProcessFlow School
Management System
Most of the modules developed under School Management
System were evolved from years of involvement in school
processes and discussion with users on the ground, this is
somewhat similar to conducting a business process
reengineering in corporate and mirror the ERP type of
operations in schools

A successful ERP implementation reduces the fragmentation of

systems and data across an organization. Sharing data across
multiple systems is labor intensive and disruptive, often
requiring manual re-keying and reformatting of critical data.
Incompatible software programs must be debugged and
recoded, and uploading information must often be done in
batches requiring exclusive use of mission critical operating
and communication systems.

Student Centric – Student Life Cycle

The concept of designing a Student Life Cycle is about
providing students with ‘electronic progress points’ with the
school, as they progress through their education experience
and through school life.

The Student Profile Management involves building an online

repository for the school to store the students’ personal
information such as their mailing addresses, photographs and
exam results. Coupled with this “Personal Profile” information
will be “Capability Profile” data that records students’
development of generic attributes and skills. “Student Activity
Life Cycle”

Perridot Systems Sdn Bhd For More Information

For more information about Perridot Systems’ products
KL Office and services, email our Information Center at
Business Suite 19A-21-3 info@perridot.com. To access information using the
Level 21, UOA Centre
World Wide Web, go to:
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http://www.perridot.com/
50450 Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia
Tel: +603-2166 5886 For more information about SMJK Dindings, visit the
Fax: +603-2166 1668 Web site at: http://www.smjkdgs.edu.my/

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This case study is for informational purposes only.
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Fax: +6084-343366 ProcessFlow School Management Systems are
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