One record per vendor, with the legal entity, the sites that ship, the bank details that are verified and the terms that apply.
Today a supplier exists in the ERP as several vendor numbers per company code, in the portal under another spelling and in procurement's spreadsheets with a fourth name.
With Lima the suppliers are read where they live, matched on VAT ID or tax number and DUNS or LEI, assembled field by field and published as one golden record per real supplier, with every source key underneath. Every purchase order, receipt, invoice, contract and quality incident for the supplier, across ERPs, with the crosswalk applied 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 verified IBAN is a strong key; a name match with a different verified IBAN opens a review; the merge waits for a person.
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 |
|---|---|
| Legal | group, entity, site |
| Purchasing | purchasing organisation, category, buyer |
| Risk | tier, spend band, criticality |
| Geography | region, country, site |
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 | IBAN passes the checksum and matches the bank country VAT ID matches the country format certificate expiry is a future date |
| Row | a supplier with payment data has a completed screening a preferred supplier has at least one approved site an exited supplier has no open purchase orders |
| Business | open purchase orders per supplier stay under the approved spend cap duplicate bank accounts across suppliers open a review spend by category equals the sum of its suppliers |
| Transactions in the bed | Read from |
|---|---|
| Purchase orders | SAP EKKO · EKPO; Oracle PO headers and lines |
| Goods receipts | SAP MATDOC; Oracle receiving |
| Invoices and payables | SAP BSIK · ACDOCA; Oracle AP |
| Quality incidents | SAP QMEL; quality systems |
| Contracts | SAP contracts; Oracle agreements |
Measures above are available in the pivot on any hierarchy level, by month or week, with calculated measures beside them. Drill-down opens every purchase order, receipt, invoice, contract and quality incident for the supplier, across ERPs, with the crosswalk applied.
Bank accounts masked to the last four digits for everyone outside treasury; screening results visible to compliance; contacts under the privacy policy. The twelve layers apply on every door; see security.
POST /api/v1/golden/supplier/lookup
{
"legal_name": "Acme Components GmbH",
"country": "DE",
"vat_id": "DE812345678"
}200 OK
{
"golden_id": "L-00731",
"confidence": 0.97,
"xref": {
"sap": "0000104471",
"oracle": "300000098",
"portal": "SUP-88213"
},
"lifecycle": "active",
"open_pos": 62
}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.
Supplier general data read from LFA1 · ADRC (BUT000 in S/4).
Open the SAP S/4HANA page →Supplier read from POZ_SUPPLIERS (REST: suppliers).
Open the Oracle Fusion Cloud page →Supplier read from Get_Suppliers (Resource Management).
Open the Workday page →Supplier read from CONFORMED.VENDOR. 3 objects, the keys in Snowflake fields, the write path and the prerequisites.
Open the Snowflake page →Supplier read from silver.vendor. 3 objects, the keys in Databricks fields, the write path and the prerequisites.
Open the Databricks page →Names, places and figures are illustrative or anonymised; the pattern is the catalogue's.
A $10B high-tech manufacturer consolidated 41,800 vendor records from three ERPs into 9,300 suppliers. Category managers saw for the first time that eleven 'different' vendors were one group, and negotiated one agreement.
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; 4 working days to a production-grade version with rules, hierarchies, security and write-back tested.
High-tech and semiconductor, Industrial manufacturing, Consumer goods, Life sciences, Logistics and 3PL. 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.