Get Started with Business Data

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe the purpose of business entities in Informatica Master Data Management SaaS.
  
• Explain the role of source records in contributing data to a master record.
  
• Describe how patch records are created and how they track changes to a master record.
  

The Data Problem Every Business Faces

Reliable data starts with structure. When organizations lack a consistent way to classify records, data becomes difficult to manage and trust. It becomes hard to distinguish a supplier from a contact, or a vendor from a point of contact representative. Without the right fields, teams struggle with incomplete and mismatched records. That makes it difficult to distinguish between supplier organizations and their representatives.

Coral Cloud Resorts, a premier hospitality company, faced this challenge as its supplier base grew. Its procurement team was onboarding vendors, service providers, and their respective contacts across multiple departments. However, without a structured way to distinguish between record types, supplier-level details were mixed in with contact-level information. That's when it turned to the Informatica Master Data Management (MDM) SaaS, Supplier 360, which uses predefined business entities to give every record the right structure from the start.

In Supplier 360, Coral Cloud Resorts can:

• Centralize supplier data in a master database.
  
• Streamline the supplier onboarding and qualification process.
  
• View relationships between suppliers and their points of contact.
  
• Design procurement strategies based on supplier performance and compliance data.
  
• Improve supplier data quality across its hospitality operations.
  

Focus on Supplier 360

Informatica MDM SaaS provides three specialized services to address individual domains: Customer 360, Product 360, and Supplier 360. While this badge focuses on Supplier 360, these principles apply across all domains.

To make that possible, Informatica MDM SaaS organizes data around a few key concepts. Let's start with the foundation: business entities.

Business Entities Are Your Smart Data Containers

A business entity is an entity of importance to your organization. Business entities can be people, places, or things. Think of them as smart containers, each one comes pre-built with the right fields for the type of data it holds.

Informatica MDM SaaS provides three specialized services to address individual domains, each includes a set of predefined business entities. Select each card to explore the business entities available in each service.

When you add a record in MDM SaaS, you choose the business entity that best matches the type of data you’re working with. For example, when the Coral Cloud Resorts procurement team onboards a new vendor called PrimeLinens and Hospitality Goods Company in Supplier 360, they select the supplier business entity. This ensures the record has the appropriate fields for a supplier organization, such as DUNS number, business type, and industry type. They also add Michelle Tran, PrimeLinens’s account executive, as a point of contact using the contact business entity, which captures individual data such as name, title, and department. When you select the right entity, you give every record the right structure and keep master data trustworthy.

How Source Records Feed the Master Record

A source record is a record that originates from a source system. Source records from multiple systems contribute data to a single master record.

Coral Cloud Resorts’s procurement platform might have PrimeLinens and Hospitality Goods Company’s DUNS number and business type, the finance system might have its payment details and currency type, and the compliance platform has its ownership type. All three are source records. Together, they feed data into one consolidated master record for PrimeLinens and Hospitality Goods Company in Informatica MDM SaaS Supplier 360.

This is the foundation of master data management. Instead of having multiple conflicting versions of supplier data, Supplier 360 brings them together so your organization works from a single, reliable picture.

Patch Records Keep Your Data Accurate Over Time

A patch record gets created whenever you edit a master record through the user interface, an API, or a batch job. It acts like a source record, but it only contains the specific master record fields that were changed.

Here’s how it works.

• When you edit a master record through any MDM SaaS service, a patch record is created for the default source system.
  
• When you edit a master record field that originated from a specific source system, such as Salesforce, a separate patch record is created for that source system.
  
• If you edit the same master record multiple times, the patch record is updated to reflect the latest changes.
  

Patch records keep a clear trail of edits without overwriting the original source records. This helps maintain data lineage and accountability.

Patch records keep a clear trail of edits without overwriting the original source records. That helps maintain data lineage and accountability.

Three Concepts, One Goal

Business entities, source records, and patch records work together to give your organization clean, reliable master data.

Together, these three elements ensure that your master data is always structured, traceable, and up to date.

Now that you understand the building blocks of master data management, you’re ready to put them to work. In the next unit, you create supplier and contact records in Supplier 360.

Resources

• Informatica Documentation: Supplier 360 SaaS | Key Concepts (login required)
• Informatica Documentation: Product 360 SaaS | Key Concepts (login required)
• Informatica Documentation: Customer 360 SaaS | Key Concepts (login required)