In 1996, eight contractors shared a common vision. They saw the need for those involved in snow & ice management to come together under one professional trade organization. They knew that in order for this organization to be a voice for the industry, it would have to be nonprofit.
They realized too that an association made up only of contractors would be just half of the equation. They wanted this new organization to encompass everyone involved in the industry, whatever their role. They reached out to subcontractors, property managers, education and medical facilities, retail establishments, government agencies, suppliers and manufacturers.
Before long, they had done it. Through exhaustive research, the help of an accountant and attorney, and days spent in a basement pounding out bylaws, the organization was born: The Snow & Ice Management Association, Inc. SIMA.
SIMA Now
After shifting headquarters from Erie, Pennsylvania to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2007, SIMA is now poised to build on the first decade of its existence as the nonprofit professional trade association for snow and ice. With new leadership at the executive level, including a new Executive Director and fresh Board of Directors, SIMA is continuously building the go-to resource for our industry.
The Board of Directors has revised its existing governance structure to adapt to changing industry needs. These new policies will help SIMA focus energy, coordinate volunteers, and develop programs and benefits related to:
- Members gaining strong improvements in managing and marketing their business
- All members having equal access to quality training related to operations and safety
- Providing members with the tools and information to maintain ethical business practices
SIMA will accomplish these goals and more by utilizing snow professionals from across North America in volunteer committees. These committees include Certification, Membership, Education, and Conference. Other task forces, such as an Ethics Task Force, Insurance Task Force, and Special Ops Task Force, will focus on specific projects using highly dedicated members.
SIMA recently engaged CloudBearing to move the company’s IT infrastructure into the cloud leveraging Microsoft’s Office 365.
Q&A with Brian Birch, Assistant Executive Director
Why did your organization decide to move to Office 365?
Cloudbearing did a fantastic job, they were patient in helping us making the decision, their pricing was easy to understand, and their follow through was excellent.
Our association is a national organization with a small staff and relatively small budget. We had hosted email in-house on a server for years, and there were always down-time issues and challenges, and as the server got older, those issues increased. As we looked at the costs of purchasing a new server, the cloud started to look very attractive. We chose MS Office 365 due to the simple pricing model, the seamless integration with Outlook, and the dependability of Microsoft. It also gives us some scalability and user control that we really would have depended on an outside IT source to leverage in the past.
How has Office 365 impacted your organization?
So far we have been very pleased with it, it freed up about 30 GB of space on our server, so we can utilize that for other storage needs. It has provided pretty much 100% up time sense we made the move, and the integration was smooth and pretty painless. There are some other nice features, like a more robust web-based email access, added functionality with MS Lync and Sharepoint, etc.
Would you recommend Office 365 to others?
Yes, so far we have been very pleased. We struggled between the choice between Google and MS365, but we were all very used to and trained on MS Outlook, and MS 365 provides the better solution for staff who do not want to move to Gmail.
How would you describe your experience with Cloudbearing?
Cloudbearing did a fantastic job, they were patient in helping us making the decision, their pricing was easy to understand, and their follow through was excellent.