One record per person at a customer, supplier or partner, linked to the organisation they work for and the roles they hold.
Today the same person is a contact in Salesforce, a partner function in SAP, an e-mail in a supplier portal and a name in Outlook, with three job titles and two phone numbers.
With Lima the business contacts are read where they live, matched on e-mail address and phone (standardised), assembled field by field and published as one golden record per real business contact, with every source key underneath. Activities, orders, tickets and portal actions for the person, and the organisation page they belong to are one click away, because the transactions sit in the same bed.
Survivorship is per field; the winning source below is the usual one, and a steward's verified edit outranks it.
A shared mailbox address is a weak key; the rules treat info@ and orders@ as organisation attributes, so two people stay apart on it.
Pairs above the merge line merge; pairs between the lines go to the steward with the two records side by side and the transactions of each; the rest stay apart. Every merge can be undone. The golden records page explains the steps.
Several structures for the same record, each kept as versions with dates.
| Hierarchy | Levels and use |
|---|---|
| Organisation | person → site → legal entity → group |
| Function | department and reporting line where known |
A pivot can roll the record's measures up any of them; a draft version is validated against the facts before it goes live. See hierarchies.
Written in one language, tested on live rows before they are saved.
| Level | Rules |
|---|---|
| Column | e-mail has a valid format and a resolvable domain phone is in E.164 form language is in the code list |
| Row | a contact with a role has an active employer a no-contact flag carries a reason and date a successor is named when a role ends |
| Business | one primary contact per role per organisation consent is recorded before any campaign membership contacts at an exited supplier are closed within 30 days |
| Transactions in the bed | Read from |
|---|---|
| Activities and e-mails | Salesforce tasks and events |
| Orders placed | SAP VBAK by created-by partner |
| Tickets raised | ServiceNow cases |
| Portal logins | portal audit feed |
Measures above are available in the pivot on any hierarchy level, by month or week, with calculated measures beside them. Drill-down opens activities, orders, tickets and portal actions for the person, and the organisation page they belong to.
Personal data under the privacy policy: names visible to the account team, phones and e-mails masked for analytics roles, deletion requests honoured across sources. The twelve layers apply on every door; see security.
POST /api/v1/golden/contact/lookup
{
"email": "r.chen@northbay-logistics.com"
}200 OK
{
"golden_id": "P-10442",
"confidence": 0.99,
"name": "Robert Chen",
"organisation": "C-00842",
"roles": [
"VP Operations"
],
"consent": "opted-in"
}The same call creates the record when nothing matches; related facts are expanded through the cross-reference; page sizes and limits are published per endpoint. See the headless API.
The objects with their real names, the keys in that system's fields, the write interface and what to set up first.
Contact read from Contact. 3 objects, the keys in Salesforce fields, the write path and the prerequisites.
Open the Salesforce page →Contact person read from KNVK (BUT050/BUT051 in S/4).
Open the SAP S/4HANA page →Contact read from HZ_PARTIES (PERSON) · HZ_RELATIONSHIPS (REST: contacts).
Open the Oracle Fusion Cloud page →Contact read from CONFORMED.CONTACT. 2 objects, the keys in Snowflake fields, the write path and the prerequisites.
Open the Snowflake page →Names, places and figures are illustrative or anonymised; the pattern is the catalogue's.
A software company merged 212,000 contacts from marketing automation, the CRM and the support desk into 96,000 people, each tied to a golden account. Bounce rates fell because the freshest verified e-mail won survivorship.
The golden record is a governed view over rows read in place; a governed replica in your lake is used only where a source is too slow or too limited to query live, and the column says so.
One working day for the first two sources; 3 working days to a production-grade version with rules, hierarchies, security and write-back tested.
High-tech and semiconductor, Consumer goods, Financial services, Life sciences. The industry pages show the domains each starts with.
Bring two systems that hold the same customers, suppliers or materials. In one working day we connect them, run the match on live rows, review the queue with your steward and publish the first golden view with its API.