How You Enable and Manage Survivorship Rules

Survivorship rules are a collection of business rules that create the best version of a record from multiple source systems.

These business rules use Source System Confidence scores as well as other criteria to determine the master or surviving record and its attributes that should be retained during merge operations.

Survivorship Rules Types

The two types of survivorship rules that are used together to define the best version of a surviving record are as follows:

• Set master record: Defines the criteria for selecting the master record at the record level.

• Set attribute value: Defines the criteria for selecting the best attribute values for the master record at the attribute level.

How You Enable Survivorship Rules

You can enable the survivorship functionality by setting the ZCH_ENABLE_SURVIVORSHIP profile option to Yes in the Setup and Maintenance work area, using the following:

• Offering: Customer Data Management

• Functional Area: Customer Hub

• Task: Manage Customer Hub Profile Options

How You Manage Survivorship Rules

You can create, edit, and delete survivorship rules in the Setup and Maintenance work area by going to the following:

• Offering: Customer Data Management

• Functional Area: Customer Hub

• Task: Manage Survivorship Rules

The rules use source system confidence level and other criteria to determine the attributes of the record that should be retained from a particular source system. Survivorship rules are stored in the rules dictionary XML file. The dictionary can be exported and imported through the Export Survivorship Rules Dictionary web service and the Import Survivorship Rules Dictionary web service.

Note:

The application doesn't support changing survivorship rules inside the Application Composer sandbox. Therefore, the merge engine doesn't pick up the changes made to these rules inside the Application Composer sandbox. When you define custom attributes or custom objects in an Application Composer sandbox, you should Publish and Exit the sandbox before changing a survivorship rule in the Manage Survivorship Rules setup task.

Predefined Survivorship Rules

Six predefined set attribute value rules are provided ready-to-use with the application:

• Least Recently Updated Organization Attribute (History Wins): This rule selects the organization attributes that have the oldest updated date.

• Most Recently Updated Organization Attribute (Recent Wins): This rule selects the organization attributes that have the most recent updated date.

• Highest Source Confidence Level Wins for Organization: This rule selects the organization attribute values that have the highest source confidence.

• Least Recently Updated Person Attribute (History Wins): This rule selects the person attributes that have the oldest updated date.

• Most Recently Updated Person Attribute (Recent Wins): This rule selects the person attributes that have the most recent updated date.

• Highest Source Confidence Level Wins for Person: This rule selects the person attribute values that have the highest source confidence.

In addition, you can use predefined templates to create new Set Attribute Value rules.

Note:

To see these predefined attribute rules, click Search button on the Manage Survivorship Rules task. You can use these predefined survivorship rules as a starting point to define the survivorship criteria that's best for your business. These rules are updated with every release. You can also create, edit, and delete these rules. However, deleting an existing rule isn't recommended. By default, these predefined survivorship rules are in the inactive status and you can activate these rules from the Manage Survivorship Rules task.