From Banner Archiving to a Single Source of Truth

When Meharry Medical College set out to retire its legacy ERP and move to Workday, the immediate problem was a familiar one: what happens to years of student, financial, and compliance data left behind in the old system? The answer became the starting point for something much larger – a governed, single source of truth designed to serve everything from accreditation reporting to, eventually, AI-driven student success.

As Meharry implemented Workday, the institution knew it needed continued access to legacy data still living in Banner, its previous ERP. The need began with financial aid: the college required a data warehouse to retain Title IV financial aid records for compliance reporting. That requirement led Meharry to Scaffold DataX, initially viewed through the lens of archiving rather than as a full data warehouse.

What began as a way to preserve legacy records quickly revealed a bigger opportunity. With multiple disparate systems across the institution, and no reliable way to reconcile the data flowing out to external agencies, Meharry recognized the need for one trusted, governed foundation that the entire organization could draw from.

A small team, a tight budget, and data scattered across systems

Meharry’s IT team is lean, and the institution was simultaneously standing up a major new ERP. Building a custom archiving and warehouse solution in-house wasn’t realistic;  the staff capacity wasn’t there, and budgets were already committed to the Workday implementation. Meharry needed a solution that was both cost-effective and didn’t require a large engineering team to operate.

At the same time, the institution faced a problem common across higher education: critical data lived in separate systems with no common definitions. Something as basic as “what is an active student?” could mean different things to different people — undermining the consistency of reports and analytics. Pulling together data for accreditors and agencies like IPEDS, the National Student Clearinghouse, and bodies such as LCME and SACSCOC was a manual, spreadsheet-driven effort that consumed significant staff hours.

“We have extensive compliance and regulatory reporting, but our data lived in too many places to reconcile cleanly. Scaffold DataX gives us one governed foundation to report from with confidence.”

— Erika Graves, Meharry Medical College

Meharry adopted Scaffold DataX to consolidate and govern its institutional data outside of any single source system. Rather than keeping the legacy Banner system running at ongoing cost, or building a custom solution from scratch, Meharry used DataX to retain and operationalize its legacy data affordably. With the financial-aid archiving need addressed, the institution began ingesting data from additional systems, including Workday and Blackboard, laying the groundwork for cross-system reporting and analytics.

Just as important, Meharry is using DataX to anchor a data governance effort — documenting shared definitions so that terms like “active student” mean the same thing across every report and dashboard. The goal: build governed blueprints that individuals across the organization can access with confidence, knowing they’re drawing from the institution’s single source of truth.

“K16 hasn’t just handed us a tool; they’ve taught us how to fish. Their team has invested the time to help our staff understand the platform, and that’s what’s setting us up to scale this across the institution."

— Erika Graves, Meharry Medical College

Meharry’s data modernization is still in its early stages, and that’s part of the story. By starting with a clear foundation, the institution is positioning itself for outcomes that build on one another:

• Cost avoidance. Choosing DataX over maintaining the legacy Banner system, or building a custom solution in-house, reduced the cost of preserving and operationalizing legacy data during a major ERP transition.
• Compliance continuity. Legacy financial aid and institutional data remain accessible for Title IV and accreditation reporting, without keeping a retired ERP online.
• A foundation for automation. With multiple systems ingested into a governed warehouse, Meharry is building toward blueprints that refresh automatically, reducing the manual, spreadsheet-heavy work of assembling data for external agencies.
• Governance by design. A formal data-governance effort is underway to standardize definitions across the institution, improving the reliability of every downstream report and analysis.

The next phase focuses on building out blueprints, including financial dashboards that would give campus leaders direct, self-service visibility into budgets, program performance, and financial health, with business intelligence tools layered on top.

“We’re eager to get true analytics going at Meharry, because the goal isn’t reports for their own sake, it’s equipping our leadership to make confident, data-driven decisions.”

— Erika Graves, Meharry Medical College

Meharry’s longer-term vision is to use its unified data to support student success — identifying early indicators that a student may need extra support, so the institution can intervene sooner and help more students complete their medical and dental degrees.

That ambition depends on getting the foundation right first. As the partnership has reinforced, you can’t layer AI on top of disorganized, ungoverned data. By establishing a secure, governed, institution-owned source of truth today, Meharry is building the kind of foundation that can support AI-enabled insights tomorrow and connect to the institution’s broader investments in innovation.

"You can’t layer AI on top of disorganized data. By getting our single source of truth right first, we’re building a foundation that’s ready for AI — and once we layer that on, it will be monumental for Meharry."

— Erika Graves, Meharry Medical College

Meharry Medical College’s partnership with K16 Solutions shows how a compliance-driven archiving need can become the cornerstone of a far broader data strategy. By consolidating legacy and active data into a single governed source of truth with Scaffold DataX, Meharry’s lean IT team has laid a cost-effective foundation for automated reporting, stronger governance, and an AI-ready future — all in service of the institution’s mission to support its students.

To learn more, visit k16solutions.com