Company Profile, Business Processes & Personas
Company profile
Meridian Commerce Group, Inc. (MCG) is a mid-sized U.S. omnichannel consumer retailer selling household, lifestyle, and electronics products through an e-commerce site/mobile experience and physical stores. It operates fulfillment centers, sources products from external suppliers, handles returns, provides customer service, and maintains a central analytics function. Rapid expansion and partial acquisitions have left a useful but inconsistent data estate.
| Characteristic | Training assumption |
|---|---|
| Scale | Approximately 50 stores, 2 fulfillment centers, ~1 million historical customer identities and ~20,000 sellable products in the story. Lab datasets use small synthetic samples first and scale only when useful. |
| Channels | Web/app, physical stores, customer service, supplier interactions, and internal analytical/reporting channels. |
| Geography | Primarily U.S.; location/state/country reference data exists so reference-data concepts can be practiced. |
| Payments | Outsourced and abstracted. Store only synthetic payment method tokens/categories when needed; no card numbers or banking details. |
| People data | Synthetic employee/persona data only; enough to practice role, access, and ethics concepts. |
| Core theme | The company has enough technology to operate, but its data is not consistently defined, governed, traceable, mastered, protected, or measured. |
Recurring personas
| Persona / unit | What they care about | Why they matter in labs |
|---|---|---|
| Elena Park — Chief Data Officer | Enterprise value, governance, priorities, evidence. | Sponsors Data Management program and escalated decisions. |
| Marcus Reed — VP Sales & Digital | Customer growth, conversion, campaigns. | Frequently pushes broad customer definitions and reuse. |
| Priya Shah — Finance Director | Revenue, margin, reconciliation, control. | Challenges definitions and report trust. |
| Jordan Lee — Data Governance Lead | Decision rights, issues, stewardship, policy. | Coordinates governance operations. |
| Avery Collins — Customer Data Steward | Customer definitions, quality, matching, issue resolution. | Central to customer master/glossary cases. |
| Noah Bennett — Product Steward | SKU/product definitions, supplier and category data. | Product/reference-data cases. |
| Riley Morgan — Data Architect | Systems, flows, models, target state. | Architecture/model/integration cases. |
| Sam Torres — Database / Data Platform Engineer | Database objects, access, operations, loads. | Technical implementation partner; not the owner of business meaning. |
| Maya Chen — BI Analyst | Warehouse, measures, dashboards. | Exposes downstream impact of weak definitions/lineage/quality. |
| Taylor Brooks — Privacy & Security Partner | Classification, access, appropriate use. | Security/ethics/governance cases. |
| Casey Grant — Change Lead | Stakeholder adoption, communication, training. | Chapter 17 and governance rollout. |
Core business-process architecture
| Process | Why data exists |
|---|---|
| Browse-to-Order | Customer browses, identifies/selects product, submits order; creates customer/order/order-item data. |
| Order-to-Fulfillment | Order is allocated, picked, packed, shipped or store-fulfilled; creates location/inventory/status data. |
| Return-to-Resolution | Customer requests return/refund/exchange; creates reason codes, return events and service records. |
| Product-to-Sellable-SKU | Product is sourced, classified, enriched, priced and made sellable; creates product/supplier/reference metadata. |
| Supplier-Onboard-to-Supply | Supplier is approved and linked to products; creates supplier and relationship data. |
| Forecast-to-Replenishment | Demand/inventory signals drive replenishment decisions; exposes analytics and quality dependency. |
| Customer-Issue-to-Resolution | Service case is opened, classified, investigated and closed; creates unstructured notes plus structured case data. |
| Campaign-to-Engagement | Marketing selects audiences and tracks responses; creates ethics/privacy/definition questions. |
| Hire-to-Offboard | Employee identity and role changes drive access and accountability scenarios. |
| Access-Request-to-Recertification | User requests access, role is approved/provisioned and periodically reviewed; supports Security/role labs. |
Casebook interpretation rule
A dataset should never appear in a lab without a business-process reason. When a lab introduces a table, file, event, or document, identify:
- Which Meridian process created it?
- Which system stores or transmits it?
- Who uses it?
- What business decision or operational activity depends on it?
- Which governance, quality, security, metadata, lifecycle, or other Data Management concerns follow from that use?
Source: Meridian Commerce Group Enterprise Data Management Casebook, Sections 1–3.