BPDM - Business Partner Data Management

Today, redundant data storage and maintenance by business partners is leading to high capacity, system and integration costs for all the partners involved in the automotive industry. In view of the growing legal, social and other requirements for business partners within the value chain, new additional expenses are constantly being added in relation to data quality, as well as up-to-datedness, speed and validations in business partner data management.

In the Catena-X Automotive Network, the so-called Golden Record, together with a unique identifier, the Business Partner Number (BPN), creates an efficient solution to the increasing data retention costs. 

The Golden Record is a concept that identifies, links and harmonises identical data on business partners, locations and addresses from different sources (“sharing partners”).During the creation of the Golden Record data, duplicates are removed, the quality within the data records is improved, missing information is added and deviations are automatically corrected. This is done using public, commercial or other agreed sources of trust and/or information. This approach reduces costs of business partner data maintenance and validation for all the companies concerned. 

Decentralised identity management is also provided as part of the Golden Record. This is based on the concept of self-sovereign identities, where the BPNs are used as unique keys to the identities. 

The Golden Record business partner data in combination with the BPN acts as the basis for a range of supplementary value-added services to optimise business partner data management. These are referred to as value-added services. Together with decentralised, self-determined identity management, they create a global, cross-industry standard for business partner data and a possible 360° view of the value chain. 

Value Added Services (VASs) are aimed at all functional areas within a company that have a business relationship with customers or suppliers or which intend to enter into a business relationship. 

With the help of a variety of analytical tools and the inclusion of external sources, the data stored is linked to events associated with risk (for example, information on attempted fraud, human rights violations, insolvencies or violations of competition and antitrust law). This data is then made available to the users in the companies. As a result, the VASs enrich the Golden Record with further information, so increase the customer benefit of each individual business partner’s data record.  

The VAS product range offers an innovative set of different early warning systems to minimise the risks in each company. These are extremely relevant especially for the functional areas of legal and compliance, sales, purchasing and finance, as well as IT and data management (e.g. fraud prevention, human rights violations, insolvencies or competition and antitrust law violations). In addition to an automated and daily updated warning system, VAS also enables users to conserve their resources. This eliminates the need to manually research and gather the information required to perform risk analyses, for example. 

The Catena-X Golden Record and the value-added services rely on a standardised, digital reporting system, visualisation through dashboards and the enrichment of the necessary detailed information. When an event associated with risk occurs, it is reported to the companies proactively, digitally and securely. In addition, new networking and automation standards are being established in companies.