I believe an Opportunity is a link between a business office and a contact. The system that only uses a number with a month and year as the business key is, I think, making an assumption that those opportunities are related to the same (business office, corporate entity, whatever). You may be able to validate that by asking those business users how they reference opportunities with other parts of the company.
In the system that uses OPP_DATE – is that a year-month similar to the previous system, or is it an actual system date? When those users talk about opportunities, do they include the OPP_DATE?
In data warehousing, we often have a dimension for DATE. I haven’t seen anything so far where there is a DATE hub.
In a project I worked on that is bringing in scanned paper surveys, we sometimes get the same survey more than once because the scanner had an issue and they reran/rescanned a survey. We assigned a sequence number so we would know that they were different.
Hi @SheriDH . Welcome to the forums and thanks for the detailed response. For business, the Opportunity is the main concept. Closed Won opportunities is the Key Performance Indicator of the success of the business. In the ideal world, the Opportunity Names / Numbers, which the Business uses to identify an individual Opportunity, should have been unique across the Global Parent company. But that is the not the case. Each Business Office uses a different system for registering and closing Opportunities. As such, when the Global Parent is referring to an individual Opportunity, they prefix it with the Business Office name to uniquely identify the Opportunity.
Should the Business Office name be part of the BKCC instead of being part of the Business Key?
@saqib I am not sure what you mean by BKCC? It’s not an abbreviation that I’m familiar with.
But to answer your question: you can have the Opportunity information in a satellite off the Opportunity Link.
It sounds like the Global Parent company is prefixing the Opportunity with the business office, so it does sound like that is part of the business key even for the office that doesn’t provide it explicitly – it’s implicit based on the source.
To @kgraziano 's point above regarding what the actual business key is – business users often use numbers instead of text names to identify data “things”. For example, a product in a catalog is referenced by its number in the business process, rather than the product name/weight/version that (perhaps) truly identify what the product is.