Business processes such as onboarding and maintenance of party data must also accommodate the complexities introduced by party data with multiple roles. In the case of business partner roles, customers and suppliers have different processes and compliance activities that involve various functional groups within the company. A Sales Manager may be the initiator of a new customer within MDM, whereas a Procurement Manager may be the initiator of a new supplier. Both activities may involve additional functional groups for further enrichment activities, such as finance and logistics. Interaction roles may also be established to provide context to what the business relationships are to other companies.
Central Onboarding in a Role-Based Entities Model
In a role-based entities model where a single entity object represents either supplier or customer business partner roles, it is recommended to manage the onboarding activities of separate business partner roles as separate onboarding workflows, i.e., a customer onboarding workflow and a supplier onboarding workflow. This ensures that onboarding activities, user personas, and data governance are distinct and relevant to each business partner role.
Each workflow must determine whether the entity and business partner role already exists in MDM. This can also be accomplished using the ‘Find Similar’ functionality. In this case, the ‘Find Similar’ algorithm should match on identifying information for a legal entity as well as the desired role to onboard. For more information on Find Similar refer to the Find Similar in Web UI topic in the Web User Interfaces documentation here.
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If ‘Find Similar’ returns a potential duplicate(s), then the user chooses to cancel the current onboarding activity and edit the existing entity and role in a maintenance workflow.
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If ‘Find Similar’ does not return an existing entity and role, then the user continues to onboard the new entity with the desired role.
As the enrichment activities are carried out by various personas, role-specific validations should be carried out by the workflow, business rules, and in the Web UI.
Central Onboarding in a Legal Entity-Based Model
In a legal entity-based model where an entity object represents a legal entity as a whole, it is recommended to manage the onboarding activities of separate business partner roles within separate onboarding workflows, i.e., a customer onboarding workflow and a supplier onboarding workflow. This ensures onboarding activities for business partner roles may be carried out simultaneously in different workflows for the same legal entity with reduced complexity.
Each workflow must determine whether the legal entity already exists. This can be accomplished using the ‘Find Similar’ functionality. In this case, the ‘Find Similar’ algorithm should match on identifying information for a legal entity as well as the desired role to onboard. For more information on Find Similar, refer to the Find Similar in Web UI topic in the Web User Interfaces documentation here.
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If ‘Find Similar’ returns an existing entity with the same business partner role the user wishes to onboard, the user chooses to cancel the current onboarding activity and edit the existing entity in a maintenance workflow.
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If ‘Find Similar’ returns an existing entity but it does not contain the same business partner role the user wishes to onboard, the user continues to edit the existing entity by adding a new role. The legal entity may then proceed through the workflow and be enriched by various personas.
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If ‘Find Similar’ does not return an existing entity, the user continues to onboard the new entity with the desired business partner role.
The onboarding workflow must also provide a way for users to onboard a new business partner role for existing entities. For example, a user would like to find an existing entity and create a new supplier role for it. The appropriate data container(s), attributes, and references must be presented to the user within the Web UI.