In these use cases the data steward is responsible for the deduplication of customer records via different merge processes.
Auto-Merge Records
ACME has several external source systems which contain multiple entity records with separate identifiers (source record IDs). Despite these different identifiers, many of these records are in fact the same individual but with minor variations in demographic data.
These individual records are sent to MDM and automatically deduplicated via the configured matching logic, which identifies and merges identical records. These matched records are then merged, and a single golden record is created.
Original source systems and respective source record IDs are maintained as part of the golden record for source traceability purposes.
Merge Entity Records
ACME has several entity records which are considered potential duplicates of one another, but the system cannot ultimately determine whether or not they are true duplicates without the input of a data steward. In these cases, a data steward must review potential duplicate records and corresponding demographics to intelligently determine whether they are a match or not.
Once STEP determines which records are potential duplicates of one another, a Clerical Review task list is presented to the data steward in the Web UI. Data stewards may review the demographics of each task to determine whether the records should be merged. If it is determined that the tasks are a match, then the Merge action will merge the records into a single golden record. If it is determined that the records are not matches of each other, then the Reject action will leave the records unmerged.
For matched records, a single resulting golden record will survive that contains the source system and source record ID of all records that were merged. For non-matched records, a Confirmed Non-Duplicate reference is established to prevent future clerical review tasks from being created for the same records. Lastly, the existing task is removed from the Clerical Review task list / workflow.
Advanced Merge Entity Records
As an alternative to the Merge function described in the above use case, data stewards can use the Advanced Merge option to manually dictate which demographics survive the merge between two or more potential duplicates. In addition, they may choose to exclude certain records from the merge.
Once STEP determines which records are potential duplicates of one another, a Clerical Review task list is presented to the data steward in the Web UI. Data stewards may select a task, and by clicking Advanced Merge, they are presented with a table view of the associating records as well as corresponding demographics. As the data steward selects which demographics will survive the merge and be promoted to the golden record, a preview column displays the resulting merged golden record. Should the data steward determine that one or more records should not be considered as a potential duplicate, the option to Exclude Record is provided.
The resulting golden record reflects the demographics manually selected by the data steward. The task is removed from the Clerical Review task list once the merge is complete.