Introduction

Trending technologies and methodologies had led to tremendous growth in the IT landscape leading to the agility of the processes. In due course of adapting to the trending technologies, customer data integration and management becomes key aspect of the maintenance. The optimum solution to leverage the data integration and management is the Master Data Management tool. Currently in market there are numerous number of MDM tools available for the usage and most of them are in use as well depending on the compatibility of the applications being integrated.  

MDM Overview

Oracle provide their support to the master data management capabilities supporting as one of the leading product support enterprise.

Oracle Master Data Management drives results by empowering enterprises and their users with the ability to cleanse, govern and manage the quality and lifecycle of master data through its principles. Oracle's MDM is a comprehensive platform designed to reduce time to market, reduce the cost of compliance as well as improve the customer experience by optimizing marketing efforts and providing the scalable ways to align to the latest technologies in market, along with providing the answers customers need.

Oracle Customer Hub also known as Siebel Universal Customer Master/Siebel UCM is one of the Oracle's leading Master Data Management (MDM) offered solutions. OCH's package functionality at enterprise level enables the capability of managing the customer data over the complete customer business cycle i.e., 360 degree view of the customer: capturing data, standardization and correction/rectification of names/addresses; Ability to identify, merge duplicate records; enrich customer profile; ensuring the governance of compliance and risk policies; and the maintenance of a "single source of truth" ensuring the best version of the customer profile is available for the consumers

In case of any other platform other than Siebel, respective MDM utilities/tools can be used depending on the client requirements.

Benefits of MDM

Below diagrammatic representation explains the industry challenges along with MDM relevance in respective area

Salient Features and Approach

As mentioned earlier, Siebel UCM or Oracle Customer Hub (OCH) solution is the leading oracle MDM tool proposed which provides the below salient features:

ü  5 Fundamental Master Data Management capabilities such as Quality, Consolidate, Quality, Share, trusted data which play vital role in overcoming current industry challenges.

ü  Compatible to establish reusable frameworks for optimum and fast delivery of Siebel UCM/OCH services and batch loads.

ü  Out Of The Box (OOTB) Siebel features related to real time services such as data decay, merge, web services, business services can be enabled & utilized

ü  Provides batch load feature(s) such as IFB, EIM and staging tables need to be utilized for batch integration

ü  Data Quality features such as cleansing, standardization, matching, survivorship and cross referencing can be maintained with the help of oracle product OEDQ integrated to the OCH component

Solution Integration Overview

In order to ensure smooth, fast and optimum scalable delivery it is important to ensure appropriate frameworks are being defined during initial setup so that the respective interface can be extended to on-going consumers/subscribers to the OCH/UCM application.

The framework can be categorized into Real Time service, Batch Load, Data Quality.

(These frameworks can be established in other MDM tools also, as per the tool compatibility)

Consumers/Source System(s) interact with UCM/OCH application either in Real Time

Services (RTS) or Batch Integration(BI) via respective middleware (s).

Real Time Services (RTS)

In the current world, as we are aware every customer expects the features to be readily available to them, which is viable by Real time services. Respective consumer can interact with OCH through middleware (e.g., say Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) or Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)).

The Incoming request (Inbound Service) from the consumer would be processed by the MDM tool, thereby responding back to the consumer with the processed data via outbound service which ensures the completion of transaction.

Batch Integration (BI)

        Respective source system might be having bulk load to the MDM component, which would be achieve through batch integration process via respective middleware (say e.g: Enterprise Integration Gateway (EIG)).

        Below are the features support in batch load:

·         In case if any of the data doesn't get updated/created via RTS then respective data can considered in batch i.e., more of backup option

·         Bulk loads of data also considered under batch flow

·         Source System(s) to retrieve the information via data mode

Oracle Data Quality (OEDQ)

                Oracle Enterprise Data Quality (OEDQ) is the primary utility for the Oracle data quality management process. It consists of several modules for customer data cleansing and matching. OEDQ capabilities are required to control, correct and maintain the quality of the customer data that are originated from multiple systems. OEDQ capability refers to functions such as customer search, customer de-duplication, customer matching, along with data standardization and data profiling.

      OEDQ is integrated with Oracle MDM tool (OCH) using Siebel data quality universal connectors. Considering the fact that OEDQ is third party utility, it can also be integrated with other MDM tools depending upon the pre-requisites and the compatibility of the system requirements.