There's only 1 practical architectural use case I can think of at the moment why you would consider setting actions as production data but would like to check in with others if there are other use cases I have not considered.
The one use case I have considered is if you are splitting the same model in to regional models, e.g. Assume there is only 1 data hub instance and the Demand Planning model has regional instances of US, EU and APAC. So customer master data load to each of these instances would have to be regionalised as well. If actions is NOT set to production data you would have to do the following:
- create a view for each region
- for each region, create actions to load customer hierarchy
- for each region, create a process to load customer hierarchy
If set to Production data, you need to do the following:
- create a view for each region
- create actions to load customer hierarchy (no need to be region specific)
- create one process to load customer hierarchy
- In each of the region specific models, update the Import Data Source to point to region specific view created in step 1.
Both options has Pros and Cons. Then it can also be argued you should have a data hub for each region as well but as for now that's the only valid use case I can think of and if there are other use cases besides the ones provided below a few years ago. Below link is more around scenarios (which makes inferences to use cases such as impact on production support changes)
