Group Data Consolidation

Group data consolidation is a complex data integration process where it is necessary to obtain both a global view of crucial business data entities (customers, employees, suppliers, products, etc.) and maintain consistent local views of each single company within the group. I.e., the overview of customer product possession from a global point of view is different from the local ones as the customer may own products from different companies within the group. But it is still important to see what products the same customer owns on local levels. The problem is that each company within the group typically keeps its own product catalogues, data structures and standards. Another problem arises with legal rights and permissions to process customer data from other legal entities within the group.In this case a so-called "consent consolidation" must be implemented based on customer agreement with his or her data processing, in addition to a basic set of customer data integration. Also customer status (a customer in one company could be a prospect in the other ones) and information usage management, which could be used for specific purposes like marketing cross-sell activities, risk assessment, collection processes, etc., have to be implemented properly. This is why group consolidation often represents not just a data quality challenge but also a huge master data integration issue.

If there is some global integration platform like an Operational Data Store (ODS) for operational data integration, CRM system or Data Warehouse (DWH) for analytical data integration purposes in place, Ataccama Data Quality Center (DQC) is able to provide all services necessary for data cleansing, data consolidation (match & merge) and of course data quality monitoring processes. On the other hand, besides standard data quality driven processes like corrected and enriched data propagation to the sources of its origin, i.e., primary systems within the group, there would still remain a massive effort to host and manage master data domains like multiple golden records for the hierarchical customer view (global and local versions of the truth) with all the accompanying legal attributes, complex product data hierarchy management, etc. As a result there would be a massive effort spent to extend existing integration platforms (if they exist) or create new ones (if they don't) to accommodate all the new data integration needs.

An alternative to that "build not buy" approach, to ease and speed up the group data consolidation delivery, could be integration of new ready-made components into the group (technically represented by the parent company) system architecture, which could be Customer Data Integration (CDI) and/or Product Information Management (PIM) Master Data Hubs. Those data hubs offer a predefined but flexible data model together with metadata generated services (both batch and online) specialized for master data integration, data cleansing, match & merge, multiple golden record management and change management connected to corrected data propagation out of the box in a highly customizable manner.

Ataccama Master Data Center (MDC) represents a general Master Data Integration (MDI) Hub which can serve as a CDI, PIM or any other master data domain management system. As it employs a solely data model driven approach, it could be used for multi-domain MDM in the case of complex group data consolidation requirements and scope.