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Unifying Global Customer Data Across ERP and CRM Systems

Executive Summary

The Global Manufacturing Company manufacturers and services complex machinery for the oil and gas industry. The products they sell consist of thousands of parts, and LakeFusion provides them with a single view of customers and their associated purchases so that they can easily schedule maintenance activities and sales cycles for upgrades.

Key Outcomes:
  1. Mastered their customer records across a CRM system, multiple instances of Oracle EBS and Microsoft Dynamics - providing a single source of customer account data to tie multiple transactions to and provide a clean source of data for a future Salesforce migration
  2. Integrated with D&B data to enrich the already mastered customer records to append corporate parent ownership, SIC code, and more

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Business Challenge

The Global Manufacturing Company struggles with understanding how their duplicative accounts relate to each other so they can find cross-selling opportunities and better understand their business with a particular company for contract negotiations.

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Solution Overview

MDM Approach

After ingesting CRM, Oracle EBS systems, and Microsoft Dynamics, which all contain customer (company) information such as company name, billing address, and other contact details, LakeFusion was able to perform LLM-based entity resolution to assign a single master ID across duplicate accounts. Once a golden record was created, D&B data was used to enrich the golden record with corporate parent information to inform sales and marketing how much business or how many accounts rolled up to a single legal entity.

Implementation Components
  1. Data Profiling & Assessment - documenting issues with unstandardized address and name data
  2. Matching & Linking Strategy - defining match logic to provide data stewards optimal number of auto merges versus manual merges
  3. Golden Record Creation
  4. Data Quality & Enrichment - using Databricks notebooks and D&B data to clean and enrich data

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Business Value Delivered

Primary Outcome

Sales and marketing teams are able to accurately report on which of their accounts roll up to a particular corporate parent, so they have visibility into total business done with a particular corporate entity

Secondary Business Benefits
  1. Corporate parent, SIC code and more are appended to LakeFusion golden records thanks to D&B integration.
  2. Duplicate customer accounts are merged into a single golden record in preparation for a planned Salesforce migration late 2026.
  3. The business team is now able to make updates to a single customer directly through LakeFusion UI rather than adjusting across four different systems.
  4. Data Quality & Enrichment - using Databricks notebooks and D&B data to clean and enrich data

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Key Success Factors

Several factors were critical to achieving project objectives:

Implementation Components
  1. Executive Sponsorship: Strong leadership commitment ensured cross-functional collaboration and resource allocation
  2. Business-Driven Requirements: Clear use cases focus on duplication of near identical customer accounts and rolling them up to their corporate parent.
  3. Iterative Matching Refinement: Multiple cycles of testing and tuning achieved high-quality matching results
  4. Change Management: Comprehensive stakeholder engagement-built trust in the new golden records
  5. Governance First: Establishing data stewardship before technology implementation ensured sustainable outcomes

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Best Practices

  • Start with Business Value: Anchoring the MDM initiative on clear use cases from business team pain points results in increased buy-in from stakeholders.
  • Balance Automation with Stewardship While auto-merge handled the bulk of matching and survivorship, manual steward review of edge cases ensured quality in critical scenarios.
  • Plan for Iteration Matching rules and survivorship logic required multiple refinement cycles based on business feedback and results validation.
  • Communicate Transparently Regular sharing of data quality findings, including issues and limitations, built credibility and realistic expectations with stakeholders.

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Conclusion

The business teams at the Global Manufacturing Company communicated a need for a solution that resolved duplicative organization customer accounts across multiple ERP and CRM systems. The time it took to generate accurate reports of their customers often exceeded the value of the reports themselves. The teams were also worried about a planned Salesforce migration because they would be creating the same problems they have with current systems with the same data going into Salesforce.

By deduplicating customer accounts right within Databricks using LakeFusion, Elliot Turbo achieved a single source of truth for customer records in about three months.

Tackling this first complex domain for them gives them the confidence and foundation to master their location/sites data as well as account contact data in their next phases of work.

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About

The Global Manufacturing Company is a leading designer and manufacturer of critical rotating equipment, including centrifugal and axial compressors, steam turbines, and power recovery expanders. Headquartered in Pennsylvania and part of the Ebara Corporation, they provide custom-engineered solutions for high-demand applications in the oil and gas, petrochemical, refining, and liquefied gas industries

Domain

Company Master

Source Systems

Oracle CRM, two instances of Oracle EBS, and MS Dynamics

Total Records

22,000

MDM Style

Golden Record (consolidation and survivorship)

Primary Use Case

Clean up data for Salesforce migration

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