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About UCM Survivorship Rules

Survivorship rules are an automated means of controlling the quality of customer data stored in the Universal Customer Master (UCM). Multiple systems connect to the UCM with record update and insert requests, and, to make sure that UCM presents the most trusted information contributed by each of these systems, administrators can create and use survivorship rules to govern which updates from which external systems can be trusted at the field level based on key criteria.

Survivorship rules use attribute groups, which determine the set of fields to be evaluated by the survivorship rule, and use comparison criteria, such as confidence level of the publishing system or the most recent published data, to evaluate whether inputs from given external systems can be used to update the UCM.

There is an implicit default attribute group, which includes the fields that are not explicitly defined in an attribute group definition. There is also a default criteria for each survivorship rule, that is, if there is no explicit rule definition for a certain attribute group (including the default attribute group), then the default criteria applies to determine whether an external system can update the UCM.

NOTE:  Do not modify or delete the names of the default attribute groups for Account and Contact. If these names are modified, make sure they match the values in the UCM Survivorship Engine User Properties: DefaultAttrGrpName_Account or DefaultAttrGrpName_Contact.

There are three comparison methods used by survivorship rules to evaluate the quality of the object fields associated with an attribute group:

• Recent—Compares the date of the object's attribute group field's data against the date of the updating message. The most recent data survives in the record.
• History—Compares the date of the object's attribute group field's data against the date of the updating message. The oldest data survives in the record.
• Source—Compares the confidence level of the external system that contributed data to attribute group fields in the object against the confidence level of the external system of the updating message. The data of the highest confidence level survives in the record.

Note the following restrictions and recommendations when defining survivorship rules:

• Although administrators can define multiple rules for each object (account, contact), use only one active rule for each object.
• Each individual field within a given object can only be included in one attribute group definition, otherwise conflicts may occur when survivorship rules are evaluated.

For details on the process of creating survivorship rules, see Process of Creating Survivorship Rules.