Organization Customers and Suppliers
There are two approaches when considering a suitable data model for business partner roles.
Role-Based Entities Model
A role-based entities model provides a clear separation of roles as independent objects to drive independent business processes within an organization.
One approach is to manage business partner roles (i.e., customer or supplier) as separate entity types with one entity type for each distinct role. Role-specific attribution may be created as description attributes and/or data containers on the entity.
For example, an organization that is both a customer and a supplier may be modeled as separate Organization Customer and Supplier entity types.
By modeling individual business partner roles as separate entities, this allows an organization to clearly delineate data governance within internal business processes such as the buying and purchasing sides of the organization. Role-specific attributes, references, and data containers will be valid for their respective role-based entity type.
Deduplication in this model is not focused across business partner roles but rather only within a specific role.
However, in this approach some potential disadvantages must also be carefully considered, such as:
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Separation of role-based business processes when there are overlapping business processes between the selling and purchasing organizations or overlapping stewardship responsibilities across roles.
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Propensity for data redundancy both within MDM and within external systems, which requires meticulous data governance measures in place.
Data lineage impact when a single role is updated. For example, when an address is changed for one role, should it also change for all other roles?
Legal Entity-Based Model
A legal entity-based approach models an organization as a single legal entity, regardless of what business partner role(s) it assumes.
This alternate approach to the role-based model is where a legal entity is represented by a single entity type. In this model, data governance across the buying and purchasing sides may be shared and any delineation between these business processes are governed by workflows, business rules, and Web UI configurations.
Deduplication in a legal entity-based model is focused on the legal entity and is agnostic to role.
All master data relevant to the legal entity is modeled on this legal entity type as description attributes and data containers.
The various business partner roles that a legal organization plays are then derived from this single entity object.
Business partner roles are modeled as role-specific entities which represent a specific business partner role. Party role entities referenced by the legal entity and the display of the relevant attributes are cross validated.
Contact Person and Individual Customers
In cases where an entity represents individual customers (i.e., a B2C consumer) or contact persons for organizations, there may also exist a multiple role situation where a contact person for an organization is also a consumer in a multi-domain solution. Using business partner roles enables an entity to act as a customer as well as a contact person. The considerations for reflecting this generalization in MDM are the same as for customer and supplier.