Student Aid Management Systems

An online system that supports financial aid office processing. SAMS runs on the IBM 9672 mainframe computer. SAMS was purchased from Sigma Corporation and adapted for the Berkeley campus. Although SIS is responsible for system maintenance and installation of system upgrades, Sigma continues to provide some maintenance support, primarily by supplying annual system changes that reflect new federal or state financial aid requirements. SAMS processes requests for financial aid, packages aid, transfers funds to/from CARS, and produces a variety of reports. Some selectively extracted data from SAMS is also made available to students through Tele-BEARS/Info-BEARS and Bear Facts. SAMS has 50 online COBOL/CICS programs and about 100 batch COBOL and FOCUS programs. SAMS is a stand-alone system that uses its own VSAM files rather than the DB2 Student Database. The user of SAMS is the Financial Aid Office.