What is data unification?
Data unification combines data from multiple sources — CRM, marketing platforms, ecommerce, service systems, warehouses — into a single, reconciled view of each customer (or product, or business entity). It's identity resolution at the customer level, deduplication at the record level, and harmonisation at the field level. Without it, every team works from a different version of the same record.
What does Decision Foundry's data unification service include?
Source-system audit (what data exists where); identity resolution model design (matching anonymous, known, and CRM identities); deduplication strategy; field-level harmonisation (e.g., reconciling "USA" / "US" / "United States"); platform implementation on Salesforce Data Cloud, Snowflake, or a CDP; governance and lineage tracking; activation handoff (the unified record is only useful if downstream systems actually consume it).
How is unification different from a CDP, MDM, or data warehouse?
A data warehouse stores everything — unification is one job you do inside it. MDM (master data management) focuses on canonical entities like customers, products, suppliers. CDPs focus specifically on customer unification + activation. Unification as we deliver it is the practice — it can live in a CDP, in Data Cloud, in Snowflake using dbt-based identity resolution, or hybrid. We design where it should live based on your stack.
How long does a data unification project take, and what does it cost?
A focused customer-360 build (5–7 sources, basic identity resolution, single activation use case) runs 12–16 weeks. A full enterprise unification (10+ sources, complex identity logic, multi-activation) runs 5–8 months. Cost depends on source-system count, identity complexity, and the platform you unify in. Every engagement starts with a data audit so timelines reflect your real data quality state.
Our data is messy — should we clean it first or unify it first?
Both, in parallel. Pure cleanup ("data hygiene") without unification often improves individual records but doesn't unlock business value; pure unification of messy data propagates errors faster. Our approach: start the unification design assuming current data quality, identify the 3–5 quality issues that block unification specifically, fix those targeted issues, then unify. The remaining cleanup happens iteratively as activation reveals more value.
Why Decision Foundry for data unification?
Unification only works when the team understands the source systems (Salesforce, MCI, commerce platforms), the unification layer (Data Cloud, Snowflake, Databricks), AND the destinations (Marketing Cloud, Service Cloud, ad platforms). We're certified across all three layers. 200+ data projects delivered, including customer-360 builds in retail, financial services, healthcare, and pharma — industries where identity resolution has to actually work to be useful.