What are best Practices for Customer 360 data modeling ?

                        Are you planning to make changes in the existing customer 360 or c360 data model ? or are you thinking to extend the customer 360 data model and looking for guidelines in doing it? If so, then you reached the right place. In this article, we will understand best practices for customer 360 data modeling in Informatica Master Data Management.

A) What is Customer 360? 

                       Informatica provides a pre-designed customer domain Master Data Management (MDM) tool. Using this we can expedite the development process for MDM implementation in our organization. Customer 360 comes with a prebuilt data model which we can either update or extend as needed.

                      Customer 360 MDM also comes with a user interface called customer 360 application and it is based on business entity services.

                      There are multiple aspects we need to consider while updating or extending the customer 360 data model and we are going to discuss this in this article.

B) What are the steps for modifying the existing customer 360 data model in Informatica MDM?

                     We can extend the customer 360 data model by various actions such as 

                               1) Changing the physical schema 

                               2) Adding needed columns to an existing table 

                              3) Adding for updating values for existing columns 

                  Following are the steps we need to perform to extend the data model.

                         Step 1 : Compare existing data model with business requirement and perform gap                                                   analysis 

                         Step 2 : Prepare documentation that will provide a list of tables and columns needed to                                        add

                         Step 3 : Take a backup of an existing schema 

                         Step 4 : Review guidelines and standards for extending the data model 

                         Step 5 : Add tables and columns as needed 

C) What are the Guidelines for extending the customer 360 data model? 

                   We can change the definition of tables or add a new table to the existing customer 360 data model. To perform these kinds of changes consider following guidelines 

                    1. Check if we can use the existing table 

                   2. Do not use a root base object to store organization or person information.

                   3. Do not define table names greater than 24 characters.

                   4. Do not delete existing columns

                   5. Do not delete existing base objects

                   6. Do not modify the data types of existing columns 

                   7. Do not modify the physical name of existing base objects. 

                   8. It is ok to modify the display name of existing base object tables or columns.

                   9. Do not decrease the length of an existing column.

                  10. Prefix the names of the new base object tables to distinguish the table from the existing tables.

                   11. For newly added column in the existing table-use prefix name of the column as x_

D) What are the guidelines for adding a new base object in the customer 360 data model? 

                  We can add root or child base objects, lookup base objects or relationship base objects. For adding new base objects we need to consider the following guidelines.

                 1. Child base object with one-to-many relationships- Add a Party Role foreign key in the table to relate the table to the Party Role table.

                 2. Child base object with many - to -many relationships- Use the relationship base object to relate the table to the Party Role table.

                 3. Use lookup Indicator as TRUE for the lookup table.

               Learn more about Informatica MDM here -