Oracle DQM Overview

Duplicate or fragmented data in the registry can significantly reduce the quality and integrity of
business operations, reporting, and decision-making, and adversely impact smooth interactions with
customers or other members of the trading community. Oracle Data Quality Management (DQM)
allows users of the Oracle EBusiness Suite platform to proactively and reactively resolve redundant
customer records by providing a highly configurable, extensible and global matching engine that
helps Oracle E-Business Suite users search customer records, prevent duplicates at the time of new
record creation and identify duplicates for resolution within Oracle TCA, the Oracle trading
community registry.

The Need
Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) is a data model which consists of information about
parties and customers. The TCA registry is a single repository across Oracle ERP and CRM
Applications
The TCA registry captures various details of the Customer like
Customer
Customer Contacts (Persons)
Contact Points (Phone, Email, Fax, URL)
Customer Sites, Site Usages, Locations
Relationship, Relationship Type
The party information inside TCA registry can be duplicated for many reasons like incomplete data,
typographical errors, conversion from external systems or spelling mistakes.
This duplicate party information may reduce performance and efficiency of the transaction
processing and further lead to several business critical issues.

The Solution

 To prevent, maintain and eliminate duplicate party information inside TCA registry, the Data Quality
Management functionality need to be implemented.
Oracle Data Quality Management (DQM) provides the infrastructure to perform high quality search,
duplicate prevention at the time of data entry and duplicate identification of existing records within
the TCA registry.

How DQM Works

Match Rules
The flexibility of the DQM engine allows a deploying company to create its own definitions of what
constitutes a duplicate record. These definitions are called match rules. They may be leveraged to
power TCA registry search screens, to prevent duplicate records from entering the TCA registry or to
identify duplicate records within the TCA registry. Match rule definition involves assigning scores and
weights to individual search attributes and related transformations. This information is coupled with a
minimum threshold score to identify two records as an acceptable match.

Word Replacements
Word replacements complement transformations to help define meaningful match rules. Word
replacements standardize words to improve the likelihood of finding duplicates. They are especially
helpful with identifying similar records that include popular nicknames or abbreviations. Out-of-thebox, DQM comes seeded with a number of word replacement lists relating to street types, US state
names, person names, and organization names.

Transformations
Transformation functions alter data stored within specified attributes of the TCA registry for the
purpose of matching. Oracle DQM transforms customer records into a form that facilitates the
identification of similar records even when words are aliased, inconsistent or misspelled. Out-of-thebox, Oracle DQM ships with several transformation functions.

Duplicate Identification and Prevention

DQM proactively prevents creation of duplicate customer records by comparing the data entered by
the user against similar records that exist in the TCA registry. Duplicate customer records in the TCA
registry can be identified using a batch process for the purpose of duplicate resolution.

Solution Overview

This solution acts as a service for both Oracle and non-Oracle applications, to allow search against
the TCA registry. Various satellite applications/ customizations (Source Systems) can invoke this
service to find potentially matching Customers, Addresses and Contacts.

Multiple Source Systems and Match Rules

This solution offers a placeholder to define a mapping between various Source Systems and DQM
Match Rules. User can attach multiple Match Rules to a single Source System and can also define
their priority of execution.

Business Threshold and User Approval

The same setup form allows users to configure Business Threshold for individual DQM Rule.

Business Threshold offers a flexibility to categorize match results between good match and an
average match. User gets an email notification requesting them to review average matched records.
A simple Review form is offered which provides detailed information about the original request,
matched results and scoring. Based on the review, user can choose a potential match.

DQM Search or Create

This solution not only offer flexible DQM search across TCA registry but also provides a functionality
of creation of TCA entities. User can configure this using simple setup form.

Source System can invoke custom DQM Engine either in Create mode or in Query mode.
Custom DQM Engine will always first try to find potential matches, if not found then it will try to
create TCA entity in case if its running in Create mode.

Custom DQM Engine

Custom DQM Engine acts as an access point to this solution. Source Systems can invoke this DQM
Engine to find potential matching Customers, Addresses or Contacts. DQM Engine uses underlying
foundation setups in conjugation with Oracles DQM APIs to most eligible match. DQM Engine also
keeps a log of every request and response which can be further used for reporting, auditing purpose.