Get Started with Source Records and Survivorship

Learning Objectives

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

• Describe the role of source records in building a master record in Supplier 360.
  
• Explain how patch records capture manual edits to a master record.
  
• Describe how trust scores and survivorship rules determine which field values appear in a master record.
  
• Navigate the Source data page to review trust scores for contributing source records.
  

Introduction

Coral Cloud Resorts works with hundreds of suppliers across the globe—from linen vendors to food and beverage distributors. Each supplier record can originate from multiple internal systems: procurement, finance, HR, and third-party data enrichment services. When the same supplier exists in all four systems, which version of the data should you trust?

That is exactly the question Informatica Master Data Management (MDM) Supplier 360 is designed to answer. In this unit, you explore how Supplier 360 consolidates data from multiple source systems into a single, trusted master record using source records, patch records, trust scores, and survivorship rules.

Focus on Supplier 360

Informatica MDM SaaS offers three domain-specific services—Customer 360, Product 360, and Supplier 360. This badge focuses on Supplier 360, though the underlying principles apply across all three domains.

Meet the Companies

Throughout this badge, you work with Coral Cloud Resorts—a hospitality company managing its supplier network using Informatica MDM—and its key suppliers.

• Pacific Linen & Hygiene: Linen and hygiene products
  
• NovaChem Solutions: Cleaning and chemical products
  
• Pacific Supply Group and Pacific Supply Corp: Supplier featured in merge and survivorship scenarios
  

What Are Source Records?

When you work in Supplier 360, every piece of supplier data starts as a source record—a record that comes directly from a source system. Source records from multiple source systems can contribute data to a master record.

For example, Coral Cloud Resorts might receive Supplier Type from its procurement system, Business Type from its finance system, and Ownership Type from HR system. Each of these is a source record, and together, they contribute to a single, unified master record—the authoritative representation of that supplier in the system.

What Are Patch Records?

Master records are dynamic. When a data steward or analyst edits a master record through the user interface, via API, or through a batch job, Supplier 360 automatically creates a patch record. A patch record acts as a source record, but it contains only the master record fields that were edited.

If someone edits the same master record multiple times, the patch record always contains the latest changes. Supplier 360 creates patch records per source system. If you edit a value that came from the Salesforce source system, a separate patch record is created for the Salesforce system. This means that manual edits are tracked as a source of truth—which makes it easy to trace where every value in the master record came from.

How Trust Scores Work

With multiple source records feeding into a single master record, Supplier 360 needs a way to decide which value to use when two source systems disagree. That decision is driven by the trust score.

A higher trust score indicates a more trustworthy field value. If a field contains invalid data—such as a picklist without a value or a field with an incorrect data type—the trust score is downgraded. Fields with valid data have a higher trust score. The trust calculation is based on settings and rules established by an administrator.

Think of it this way—if Coral Cloud Resorts’ procurement system consistently delivers accurate, validated address data while the finance system occasionally skips zip codes, the procurement system’s address fields carry a higher trust score. Supplier 360 uses that score to determine which address appears in the master record.

You can also configure trust scores with decay rules. This means that older data gradually becomes less trustworthy over time, which ensures your master records always reflect the most current information.

Survivorship and the Best Version of the Truth

In addition to trust scores, Supplier 360 also uses survivorship criteria, configured by administrators, to establish the best version of the truth. Survivorship is the process of creating a master record, the most trusted version, from multiple matching source records.

To configure survivorship, administrators rank source systems by their reliability and configure survivorship rules for business entities, field groups, or individual fields. When you configure survivorship for a business entity, all fields and field groups inherit the configuration by default.

The three main types of survivorship rules are:

• Decay: Field values lose trust over time, which favors more recently updated data.
  
• Maximum: The field value with the highest trust score survives.
  
• Minimum: The field value with the lowest trust score survives, which is used for certain scenarios such as risk ratings.
  

For Coral Cloud Resorts, the team might rank the procurement system highest for supplier names, while ranking the HR system highest for sourcing manager. This per-field granularity ensures that every value in the master record comes from the most reliable possible source.

Review Source Records and Trust Score Indicators

To review how a master record was built, you use the Source data tab on the record details page. This page shows every source record contributing to the master record, along with trust scores and survivorship criteria for each field. Each source record also displays an icon that represents its source system, which makes it easy to identify which system contributed which values. To review these details in search results, open the master record you want to review and select the Source data tab.

The page includes the master record alongside all contributing source records and patch records.

In the Source data page, you can enable Survivorship details to view survivorship rules, source rankings, deduplication settings, and trust scores for all source records at once. Trust scores appear at the field level and help you identify which source record is contributing each value to the master record.

Here’s how to interpret what you find.

• The field value with the highest trust score in a given source record is the one contributing to the master record.
  
• The master record column shows the current winning value for each field, with an indicator showing which contributing source record it came from.
  

The Source data page for Pacific Linen & Hygiene displays four source records, each with a different version of the Name field. Trust score indicators allow you to quickly identify the winning value for the master record. For the Name field, Pacific Linen & Hygiene (S21) from the Procurement system (P) is the winning value with a score of 100, as Procurement has the highest source reliability ranking. Note that the single letters in parentheses indicate the source system—such as (P) for Procurement—while the alphanumeric values indicate the unique source record identifier.

Other winning values that earned a score of 100 and contributed for the master record include:

• Hospitality (S21) from Procurement (P) for the Industry Type field.
  
• Distributor (S21) from Procurement (P) for the Supplier Type field.
  
• Asset Based (S22) from Finance system (F) for the Business Type field.
  
• Private (S23) from Compliance (C) for the Ownership Type field.
  
• 50 (S21) from Procurement (P) for the Number of Employees field.
  
• 03/11/2010 (S21) from Procurement (P) for the Date of Incorporation field.
  

In this unit, you explored the foundational concepts that power data consolidation in Supplier 360. You learned that source records bring data in from external systems, patch records capture manual edits, and trust scores determine which values are most reliable. You also saw how survivorship rules—configured by administrators—combine with trust scores to establish the best version of the truth in every master record.

In the next unit, you go one step further. What happens when the system’s automatic survivorship decision isn’t right for your business? You learn how to manually override survivorship and take direct control of the master record.