Texas A&M University System · Higher Education · College Station, TX · 24 weeks
11 campus data warehouses consolidated into one
Texas A&M University System managed 11 separate campus data warehouses, each with duplicate infrastructure and ETL processes, making cross-campus reporting impossible. We merged all 11 into a single Snowflake environment, cutting infrastructure costs by $2.3 million annually and delivering same-day reports across campuses.
Challenge
Each of the system’s 11 campuses maintained its own data warehouse, developed separately over 15 years. These warehouses didn’t share metrics or support reporting across campuses. Infrastructure costs overlapped heavily, totaling $2.3 million annually. The chancellor ordered a consolidation to cut costs and simplify technology.
Approach
We spent six weeks mapping 11 warehouses, their data models, and reporting dependencies. Then, we built a single Snowflake environment with a shared semantic layer. We migrated the warehouses in groups of three over 18 weeks. Each migration had a four-week overlap where both old and new systems ran in parallel before shutting down the legacy warehouse.
Outcome
By week 24, we consolidated all 11 campuses into a single system. This cut annual infrastructure costs from $2.3 million to $380,000. We built a reporting platform that delivers cross-campus data on the same day. Within the first month after consolidation, the chancellor's office launched three analytics projects using this new system.
When we dug into the audit, we spotted three warehouses with zero active users.
In just six weeks, we found three warehouses with fewer than five active users each. But get this, they were costing $420K a year in licenses and maintenance. We didn’t mess around. We shut them down immediately to stop the bleeding before moving on to the bigger consolidation stuff.
Tracking cohort progress with a little help from our campus champs
Before we started the migration, we made sure to put a data lead in charge at each campus. The first three campuses dove right in and set the pace. Watching them make headway really lit a fire under the others. By the time the third group came around, some were even pushing to speed things up beyond our original plan.
Diving into cross-campus data to fix real, everyday problems
We put together a dashboard to track enrollment and retention across all 11 campuses. The chancellor’s office had been struggling with data gaps for 15 years, this finally put an end to that. But it wasn’t just about filling in missing pieces. We gave them clear, actionable insights that even the biggest skeptics couldn’t argue with.
Results
- $2.3M Annual infrastructure savings
- 11 Warehouses consolidated to one
- 5 days to 2 hrs Cross-campus report time
- 24 wks Full system migration
We were running 11 warehouses at $2.3 million a year, and none of them were connected. Thinklytics pulled it all together in 24 weeks. Now, the chancellor’s office can see cross-campus analytics they didn’t have before.