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How we process your business partner data: masterdata project

Overview and detailed insights on how business partners (supplier, customer & own business) data is processed in Prewave

Maximilian avatar
Written by Maximilian
Updated today

The masterdata structure defines how data can be uploaded to Prewave. With focus on data quality, only validated sites can be used for interactions. Validated sites are defined later on as those sites that have a green validation status.

This article explains the principles of the data onboarding procedure, the quality levels and further background knowledge. This process covers all the business partners that are going to be added to the system - suppliers, customers and own business sites.

Goals

  1. Faster site processing (Peer Score in Minutes)

  2. Customer specific industries for Peer Score generation

  3. Validation process to increase data quality

Onboarding process: From initial setup to validation

  1. Initial setup: Supplier is added to the system with customer input, site remains private. Customer specifies company name and industry (Peer Score).

  2. Screening: As a next step, the screening request can be triggered. When you request screening for a target, you are requesting to see a historic alert score of that specific company. This gives you the ability to have a more holistic overview of the past alerts of a target.

    • Prewave tries to identify the site group to proceed with the screening

      1. Successful: Screened = Yes

      2. Unsuccessful: Screened = No

  3. Validation: Validation describes the process of masterdata matching. The customer's data is compared against Prewave’s existing data, and if Prewave is confident that the customer is referring to the same site already in our system, the customer's targets are validated, meaning their existence is confirmed.

If the site is unknown to Prewave, other databases are going to be checked to see if the site is recognized elsewhere. If so, the site's existence is also validated.

Internal process workflow

Initial Setup

Data which is freshly onboarded using one of the ways mentioned above will be created

  • within a few moments in a fully automated way

  • as a private site, meaning that it will only be accessible to users within the same customer environment

  • without an integration into Prewaves global supply chain graph (yet).

Such an initial site can be used only for peer scoring and regional monitoring.

Screening

Qualifying such a site to be used in further ways requires a screening to be done. A screening needs to be requested, and counts towards the contractually agreed quota. It has two principal purposes:

  • Validating the existence of the site

  • Providing a full (360) score

As such, a screening comes with longer waiting times than the initial onboarding, as it includes multiple manual validation steps, as well as the actual historical screening, where potentially huge volumes of data need to be processed.

Validation

The validation of a site consists of the following four components:

  1. Validation of the address:
    As mentioned above, anything that could be handled by the automation already as part of the initial setup does not need any further validation. So ideally this step can be skipped entirely. If not, the following steps are taken. The implications on the regional monitoring will be the same as described above.

    1. If only the address could not be confirmed automatically (due to it being inconsistent with the country/city/zip, ambiguous, incomplete or simply incorrect), a manual check is done, trying to find the closest point on the map which can be related to the address with sufficient certainty.

    2. If also the city could not be confirmed automatically (due to it being inconsistent with the country/zip, ambiguous, incomplete or simply incorrect), a manual check for both parts, address and city are done, ideally being able to come up with an exact location as well, but with the fallback possibility to confirm at least the city part.

  2. Validation of the site group:
    Independent of the result of the address validation, an attempt is made to match the provided company information (name and website) with the site groups that already exist in the Prewave database. If this cannot be done automatically with sufficient certainty, a manual confirmation is required. In case this link cannot be established, it is determined whether the provided company information can clearly identify a valid business in an unambiguous way. This is done both automatically and manually if needed, and leads to the creation of a new site group in case of a success.

  3. Validation of the combination of site group and address:
    In case both validations above were fully successful, a check is made to confirm the combination of both - i.e. the fact that the given site group in fact operates at the given location.

  4. Deduplication:
    If all validations are positive, the confirmed site is compared against the already existing sites within Prewave and merged in case it already exists. This is the ultimate step within the validation, and leads to the site being included in Prewaves global supply chain graph.

Of all these validations, the confirmation of the site group has clearly the most impact. It basically decides whether a screening will be finished successfully or not. With the presence of a site group, a site is qualified for almost all use cases within Prewave - including the provisioning of a full score.

Full Scoring

Of all these validations, the confirmation of the site group has clearly the most impact. It basically decides whether a screening can be finished successfully or not. With the presence of a site group, a site is qualified for almost all use cases within Prewave. The list below provides an overview about which:

  • Live monitoring of company related events

  • Historic screening of company related events

  • Supplier engagement being able to get into contact by sending self-assessments and statement requests for instance

  • Prerequisite for the mapping of tier-n supplier data

  • Determining the impact based on the revenue of the site group

Data Matching

Each data item must be provided with a reference, and this reference is crucial in how the data is further processed. Such a reference must be unique (within its connection type) as it is used to identify the data. How this is done will be explained later.

Validation status

Validation status

Explanation

Screenshot 2024-12-19 at 13.49.01

Red status in case the Site Group of the Site can't be identified (no public records about the company or ambiguous information). No monitoring / Alerting possible. Further no client communication enabled.

Screenshot 2024-12-19 at 13.48.56

Yellow entry status for newly created sites. Peer Score is available. Not confirmed sites have not been verified by Prewave and are therefore not available for external communications (self-assessments, statement requests, …). The site remains private for the customer.

Screenshot 2024-12-19 at 13.49.06

Green status indicating that Prewave can confirm the existence of the Site Group. Measures & Actions are enabled.

Target profile: Infobox content of validation status

The infobox on site level contains detailed information when hovering over the colored validation status. For the green status, you can see the example below.

Site group: Can Prewave confirm the existence of the company?

Monitoring: Is the site actively monitored?

Location based monitoring: Is the site enabled for regional monitoring / Can Prewave confirm the existence of the city?

Location: Can Prewave confirm the existence of companies operations at this address?

Supplier Engagement: Are Self Assessments and Statement requests enabled for the site?

Screened: Is an Alert Score available?

The yellow status indicates that you need to request screening in order to enable supplier engagement, monitoring and alert score.

The red status mentions that the site group could not be identified. As a hint, it mentions “Person” which refers to the fact, that we don’t create sites for freelancers.

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