Jen Schugel with CentraCare can’t imagine doing a migration project without Compendium. Here’s why.
When CentraCare, a large Midwest healthcare organization, started migrating from Crystal Reports to Power BI, they didn’t want the process to tie up their reporting team or slow down their insights.
But with 15 years worth of reports to migrate, that was a big ask.
Fortunately, Jen Schugel, who was overseeing CentraCare’s data and analytics development team at the time, knew just the solution—and it was already set up and ready to go.
Can a data catalog speed up your migration? (Yep.)
CentraCare was already using the Compendium Data Catalog to organize and streamline their data and reports, but Jen, who was filling an interim role, had worked with Compendium in other roles previously.
She knew she could use it to manage the migration.
Here are four ways Compendium is helping Jen and CentraCare save time and speed up the project:
1. Everyone can find their reports, no matter where they’re at in the process.
When you’ve got hundreds of users looking for reports, and your team is in the middle of moving them from one system to another, it becomes critical for everyone to be able to quickly see where everything is located. Compendium shows the exact location of every report, instantly.
“It sounds like a small thing,” says Jen, “but it’s really important”.
2. Jen can monitor the status of the overall migration. (How many reports still need to be migrated?)
CentraCare has several developers working on the migration project and Compendium helps all of them understand where to focus their energy, and where not to. Jen is able to easily track the overall progress and update leaders on the project status.
“Instead of trying to wrangle a huge spreadsheet, we use Compendium to see how we’re working our way through the reports,” says Jen. “It helps me figure out where we’re at, which reports we need to migrate next, how many we have left, and all of that.”
“Especially as a manager, I find Compendium extremely helpful.”
3. No one is doing duplicate work. (Did someone already migrate this report?)
With dozens of tickets coming in every week, it would be hard to stay on top of which reports have already been migrated without a tool like Compendium.
“It’s really demoralizing to spend six hours migrating a report and then realize someone else already did it and you both just worked on the same thing,” says Jen. “Compendium helps us communicate with each other, so we can alleviate duplicate work. If somebody has already migrated a report, or if it’s in progress, others can see that.”
4. The organization retains valuable history for each document. (Where did this report come from? Who performed the migration? When was it last updated?)
Compendium keeps all the metadata related to each report easily accessible, including who’s the developer, whether (and when) it’s been migrated, whether (and when) it’s been archived, where it’s located now, and where it used to be located. It also maintains the linkage to the original Crystal Report metadata so none of the past business logic, notes, or lineage are lost.
“Always check Compendium first.”
Jen’s developers know that when they get a request for a report, or for a modification on a report, they need to check Compendium first to see if somebody has already migrated that report or if it’s already in progress. If not, they’ll start the process by adding their name in Compendium and updating the migration status so everyone else knows the status.
CentraCare’s request “translators” use Compendium as well. They’re the ones who first receive the tickets and work with the developers to accomplish the ask. They too always check Compendium first to see things like who was the original developer of the report. That way, if questions arise, they can track down answers.
“We’re always reinforcing that everybody needs to look at Compendium first,” says Jen.
“Compendium has been really key in helping facilitate the migration project.”
“I can’t imagine trying to do this without Compendium.”
Migrating hundreds of reports to Power BI is a massive undertaking. How would Jen and CentraCare be managing the project if they didn’t have Compendium?
Jen says, “I envision it would probably require a big spreadsheet… but that’s just—yeah, I can’t even imagine trying to do it that way.”
“Compendium is making this migration a lot more efficient,” she says. “To be able to document things and use Compendium as that source of information—being able to see where reports are in the migration process. I don’t have to be the person to know the status of all of these reports. I mean, that’s just not even possible.”
“The transparency Compendium provides is really important,” she adds. “We can see the status of all the reports and the definitions—not only our developers and analysts, but our users can too.”
Facing a big migration project at your healthcare org? Make sure you’ve got Compendium.
Compendium keeps any data migration project moving quickly and smoothly, and it’s easy to get started. Learn more today.
