In large heterogeneous enterprise landscapes, customer data is authored and stored in various systems such as the e-commerce system, the customer relationship management (CRM) system, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, etc. These systems provide valuable functions making it necessary that users continue to work in them. However, business processes, such as placing an order for a product, can often span multiple applications. For instance, an order may come in via the e-commerce system but be fulfilled by the ERP. This can often cause problems due to significant dependencies on the consistency and timeliness of data synchronization between applications. If the delivery address for an entity is changed in the e-commerce system, it must also be changed in the ERP, so the order can successfully be delivered. Therefore, it is essential to create a tighter coupling between operational systems and the MDM system, so that the entity data is synchronized as needed. This tight coupling is possible with a Coexistence-Style MDM implementation, where centrally governed records are created and updated in a large heterogeneous enterprise landscape.
In the Coexistence methodology, multiple systems containing the master data must operate at the same time. The entity data is authored and stored in various external sources while being synchronized to the MDM system. This is accomplished in STEP through the synchronous, request-response based web service for golden record creation and update. This process involves deduplication, conflict resolution, and validation operations, resulting in the creation / update of golden records or rejection of the create / update. Updates to the data can be done in the source system and any external systems that masters entity data. STEP synchronizes the content of golden records back to the source systems, keeping every source up to date with data contributed from any source. This can be done either via direct integration with source systems or publishing to a data warehouse both for synchronization and for further analytics.
For the ability to only search STEP for existing records before new ones are created in external systems, refer to the Find Similar Web Service topic in this documentation here.