We a right now heading fast to the classic chaos that many large companies have. A lot of stovepipe systems with manual integrations where we have to enter the same information twice.

Application Landscape (with integrations)

An old school integration solution would be file transfer with FTP and a more modern way to work would be an API-based integration, eventually combined with a MDM-platform.

Our business model for film production is mainly a B2B operation, which means that we manage a limited set of business parties and individuals. Our strategy is to separate IT for the different business units, so this makes our solutions more simple.

Individuals

We use information about individuals for a number of different purposes, both as customers, suppliers and employees. The personal information need in some cases be stored for more than a lifetime as copyright is valued up to 70 years after the death of the copyright holder. In other cases, we need to get rid of the information after a few years.

The number of involved individuals grow over time and the information about individuals is used in several programs.

Products

Our products are either productions or resources as individual roles or equipment. These roles are well defined and changes to them are not very frequent. We have a product master, with REST-API and we could fairly easy integrate with other systems.

Projects

The third type master data is projects as this is how we structure and follow up work. Projects are updated rather frequently and need to be present in a lot of systems. As we have a master already for this, a simple publish subscribe integration from Visma would be sufficient.

Solution

We don’t have one single system as master for individuals, as the information is spread out in different systems. We definitely need a good life-cycle management, as we store some information for a very long time. Together, these are good reasons to have a separate master for individuals.

An individual can over time be an employee, a customer, a supplier or an employees of a customer or a supplier. Sometimes several combinations at a time. Each individual can have different roles in a production, so we also need this flexibility.

We need to manage this from an international perspective, as individuals will have different nationalities.

Information about an individual could be less or more sensitive, so we have to think about information classification and improved security.

This means that we need to define an information model that supports business parties, individuals, roles and groupings. Preferable a standard information model so that we don’t need to invent the wheel again and again.

In addition to this, we need to keep track of what purpose we use individual information for.

Do you know a low cost, low maintenance, flexible, scalable and secure MDM solution that is easy to implement?

Disruptive architecture