CDQ Data Quality as Service

Problem

When we search for a business partner in the CDQ Lookup, the request is executed against all data sources that are active for the country, and the candidate list is ordered by the matching score only. There is currently no way for us to express which sources should lead for a given country.

As a result, the top matches are often returned from sources that are not the authoritative ones for the country we are searching in — for example registers of neighbouring countries, pooled data or map/place providers — all with very high match rates, while the sources we would expect to lead for that country appear much further down the list. The list is technically correct, but it does not match what our users expect, because they know which register is the reference for that country.

Request

Please introduce a country-specific selection and prioritization of data sources for the Lookup, maintainable via configuration:

• Prioritize one or several data sources per country, so that the leading / preferred sources for that country come first in the result list.

• Deselect / exclude specific data sources per country, so that they are not used for lookups of business partners from that country.

• Maintainable per Lookup configuration, so that different use cases or business units can apply different country strategies.

Important scope note

It is not sufficient to have this configuration only at a later processing stage (e.g. during golden record creation or curation). The selection has to be effective at lookup time, because our users decide on the candidate list that the Lookup returns.

Expected benefit

• Match results that meet our expectations per country — the authoritative source for the country leads the list.

• Higher first-time-right rate and less manual re-work in the search and creation process.

• Fewer requests to sources that are not relevant for the country, and therefore lower quota and cost consumption.

• Our country data strategy becomes explicit and documented instead of remaining implicit knowledge of individual users.

Generic example

A search for a well-known legal entity in country A (name + country + city) returns as the first matches candidates from sources of countries B and C, from the pooled data and from a map/place provider — all with a match rate of about 99% — while the official register of country A and the closest neighbouring official register appear only further down the list. With a country-specific source prioritization, the official register of country A would lead the result list.

Why this matters to us

We hit this regularly when the Lookup is used for the first-time-right search in our business partner creation process, and it costs our data stewards time on every affected search. The more countries we onboard, the more pressing it becomes — for some of our rollouts the expected result quality per country is a blocker.