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Special markets is not easy to define. Traditionally, every distributor, manufacturer and customer classifies special markets differently. They use different labels, put them in different classes, and attempt to fit them in to rigid relational structures such as parent/child.  As special markets evolved and customers began integrating more closely with manufacturers and distributors, it became clear that the industry needed a common language and standardized formats.


As the authority in special markets data, Elevation Data Group embarked on a mission to rethink and redesign special market classifications and relationships. We have created a new standardized data format that provides the following features:

– Unique IDs for customer families & locations, distributors, and manufacturers.

-New organization of special markets “families,” allowing for a single location to have multiple affiliations.

-New affiliation metrics, such as family influence and school/government.

-Standard data structures for special markets contracts, transactional data and dental products.

-A single source of truth for group associations and contracts that connects customers to distributors and manufacturers.


Global Assignment Rules: A living library of data cleaning rules that assign and consolidate group names. These rules automatically run with special markets processing for manufacturers. These are updated and rolled out quarterly.

TRAM Location Data: This data has either been independently collected by EDG or provided by the groups themselves. We use a probabilistic matching algorithm to connect these locations to special market data.

TRAM Custom Location Data: a partner can load them as a custom list. Integrates to TRAM in the same way as standard locations, but custom locations can only be matched to the providing partner’s data.