Solving from the Top of the Transformation Chain, Part 2

Whenever the exercise to determine the 25 largest customers is undertaken, start with a focus on the sourcing, matching and identifying steps of the transformation chain because linking up related entities within corporate family trees is the hardest step. You don't want to do this heavy lifting with data that is dirty when it arrives at the relationship process. The only way to solve the problem of determining the 25 largest customers is to: * Create permanent IDs once you have uniquely identified each entity and have the governance structure in place to ensure that people don't regularly create new ones rather than taking the time to find the entity. Monitor the creation of false new entities and establish consequences for compliance and noncompliance. Let's make this concrete with an example. Suppose you work for a company with multiple databases supporting sales, customer service, order to cash and fulfillment. Your company has information about another company, let's call it ABCD, Inc. ABCD was created by the merger of AC Corp. and BD Inc. In the various databases from around the world, there might be business entities with names like AC Ltd., BD GmB, plus other business entities with names like AC Enterprises, BD Petroleum and other names that appear to be unrelated. Your sales teams around the globe may use shorthand names like A-D, etc. A salesperson may have a name and contact address for a subsidiary that was acquired last year, while the order-to-cash team has changed to the post-merger name.