Strategies to effectively propagate Master Data Merges

Unifying records into Master records is hard, but propagating their merges prove even harder.

I have recently written about the approach to handle master data management matching and merging of records into master records. Leveraging SSOT is, however, a bit more complicated than just being able to create these records. It is also about being able to propagate these changes.

(Hard Merge)

Hard merge provides a consolidation of records that do not allow for disassociating the different records that were merged. Propagating the changes coming from a hard merge vs. a soft merge can be easier in some aspect and harder in other. There are quite a few distinctions in the different approaches that can be taken to propagate the unification of records, be it from leveraging an API to pushing actual updates.

Using an API

API Routing

Using the API for hard merge can quite straight forward, most of the work happens under the hood and is abstracted from the other systems, provided they are not doing calls to scrape the API incrementally.