Recently, we’ve been helping several leading life sciences clients understand the details, requirements and powerful possibilities of a migration to Generis CARA. If you are unfamiliar, we highly recommend taking the time to learn about the platform to compare your current challenges against CARA’s capabilities. Here’s a quick overview to get you started. Download our Generis datasheet for additional details and to request to meet with fme’s Generis CARA experts.

About Generis CARA

First off, the CARA Platform from Generis is a versatile, low-code foundational content and data management platform designed to solve the complex needs of industries such as pharmaceuticals, biotech, medical devices, and other highly regulated sectors. Regular updates and an experienced eye on the future of content management allow the CARA Platform to deliver a comprehensive, scalable solution equally suited to storing content and contentless objects, providing configurable flexibility to be used for almost any industry.

For life science firms, there is the CARA Life Sciences Platform: an interconnected suite of applications specifically designed to address the challenges of companies with interconnected Regulatory, Quality, Safety, and Clinical processes. It is an easily configured and pre-validated apps platform leveraging distinct modules that simplify and streamline system administration tasks. Generis CARA provides the connectivity, visibility, consistency and capability to reduce re-work and wasted effort and take control of business processes.

Generis CARA provides:

• Powerful Architecture: The CARA Platform is back-ended by ElasticSearch, a non-relational database designed to flexibly handle millions of events per second and petabytes of data.
• Flexible Configuration: The CARA Platform boasts an in-browser configuration interface with a broad menu of capabilities as well as direct scripting for advanced requirements. Implementation teams are able to script, test, and publish custom actions and other scripted activities without accessing a server or setting up an integration. This supports a seamless user experience with substantially less downtime for updates.
• Built in AI Features: Generis built CARA with substantial AI capabilities available out-of-the-box including practical use cases deliver tangible ROI and significantly reduce the time to search for, manipulate and create content.
• Shared Administration Ownership: To maximize user adoption and useability, core admins can manage type definitions and other configuration items with the potential for broad impact, while exposing a limited scope of configuration to allow business leads, junior admins, or expert users to make changes to dictionary drop down lists, update dashboards, reports, and workflow templates. Used effectively, this capability can alleviate day-to-day administrative activities for core admin teams, freeing resources to work on priority projects and initiatives.
• Exceptional User Experience: The end user experience is often the greatest consideration when selecting a platform and the CARA Platform provides a well-planned, incredibly responsive user experience. Users will be able to quickly adopt the CARA Platform and configure it to their own requirements.

Challenges of Migration to Generis CARA

While the power and flexibility of the Generis CARA Platform is clear, there is an important point to remember. In fact, this isn’t just a quirk of CARA, it is the same for any solution: all capabilities and functionality heavily depend on the organization of the data, metadata and documents it contains. A great system with redundant, obsolete and / or trivial data won’t deliver the useability, compliance requirements or ROI that a business needs to achieve its goals. Unfortunately, many companies fail to effectively prepare their data for the final migration to their target platform, mostly because they are simply unaware of the state of their data.

Here are a few of the ‘short cuts’ we’ve been called to correct:

• Assuming 1-to-1 Transfers: This is a far too common mistake. Moving data from a legacy solution to a new, modern platform will never be a 1-to-1 transfer. The way software developers store and even think about data changes continuously. New structures, formats, and metadata requirements evolve to be more efficient and compatible with new systems and coding languages. Think about it: If a data structure hasn’t changed, there’s a high probability the platform isn’t evolving to meet the needs of today’s businesses. Tread carefully when there is an assumption that your migration experience will be easy and a simple “like-for-like” – unless you’re taking a digital solution that has the exact configuration as your legacy system, this will never work. Trust us.
• Vendor Professional Services: This sounds like a criticism but it’s simply a business reality. Vendor professional services understand their own system, but have little experience in the structures of the many different source repositories. They’ve focused their time on building a forward-looking solution to solve challenges of today and be ready for the future. They don’t have time to train on, or more importantly, have true hands on experience with, the details of every possible legacy system or the always-present customizations and workarounds made over the years. Likewise, we have seen far too often our clients being handed a mapping specification by vendors and told to fill it out. Good luck! You are going to need it without industry and migration expertise on board.
• AI and ‘Automated’ Tools: Emerging AI-based data analysis tools promise a lot, and some are more accurate than others, but they aren’t prepared for the intricacies of regulated data, compliance regulations and requirements, or improperly stored and classified data. The consequences of failure are high, and AI-based tools without detailed human review haven’t proven they can accomplish the tasks required without adding substantial risks.
• Relying on Internal Resources: We have worked with amazing teams, but even the most skilled internal resources rarely have the required time to focus on a full migration effort. It is also rare for them to have the depth of knowledge required within both their existing system and the newly updated CARA platform. Many times, we’ve seen deadlines extend far beyond initial plans as skilled internal resources are shifted to other priorities and data preparation receives less focus. This inevitably causes sacrifices and short cuts, increasing risks of errors and detrimental business consequences. In some cases, we are called in after the fact to support massive remediation efforts due to the rush job of simply shoving data in to meet a deadline.

fme Simplifies Migration to Generis CARA

The bottom line is, an accurate, organized data migration is essential for the success of any digital transformation initiative. This is our focus. fme has become the industry leader in successfully executing the complex migrations that allow industry leading firms take advantage of the most powerful new solutions. In fact, after over 20 years of migrating data from all leading platforms, we are experts at extracting, transforming, and importing legacy data effortlessly from any source system, including databases, file shares, cloud platforms, and legacy applications.

As a certified Generis partner, we understand the requirements, functionality and configuration options of the CARA Platform. Let us help you ensure your data is transferred accurately and efficiently, on time and on budget, so you can achieve the full value of your investment in the CARA platform. Download the datasheet below to learn more about our data migration methodology, as well at the additional ways we can support your transformation journey.