Use Customer Merge to consolidate any duplicate customers or transfer site use activity from a customer or site that is no longer active.
After the merge completes successfully, all activity that was previously associated with the old customer or site is now associated with the new customer or site. Activity includes invoices, debit memos, commitments, credits, receipts, adjustments, and chargebacks. The merge process also checks for records in the AutoInvoice interface tables.
You can also retain links to external systems, such as legacy and third party systems, by using the Oracle Trading Community Architecture Source System Management (SSM) feature. You can use SSM to map external systems to the entities in the TCA registry. After you map Source names and codes to TCA entities, the merge-to customer retains the cross references to the external systems of both the merge-from and the merge-to customers. See: Source Systems Overview.
Attention: You can only merge sites that pass tax validation. See: Tax Validation for Merge.
You can either merge site uses for the same customer or all of the site uses for two different customers.
Attention: You can merge site uses only in the operating units that are on your access list.
Predefined site uses include Bill-to, Ship-to, Statements, Marketing, Legal, and Dunning. You can only merge a bill-to site with a bill-to site, a ship-to site with a ship-to site and so on whether you are merging different customers or two sites for the same customer.
You can also choose to either inactivate or delete your old customer and sites use information. If you choose to delete the customer or site use information, then it is removed from the database and the application does not maintain an audit trail of this data. Note that you cannot directly delete a customer. You must use the Customer Merge process with the Delete after Merge check box selected to merge your customer (called the From Customer) to a dummy customer (called the To Customer). This process deletes the merged (From) customer. If you are merging sites for the same customer, then you cannot choose to delete the old customer information (since the customers are the same).
Whether you can inactivate or delete the merge-from customer depends on the account sites. If the merge-from customer has:
Sites only in the operating units that are on your access list - you can delete or inactivate the merge-from customer.
Inactive sites in other operating units - you can inactivate but not delete the merge-from customer.
Active sites in operating units to which you don't have access - you can neither inactivate nor delete the merge-from customer.
Old customers and site uses that are merged are assigned a status of 'Inactive' after the merge process is complete. Inactive customers cannot generate new transactions, but you can view their information or reactivate them at any time in the Customers window.
Customer Merge distinguishes individual customers (consumers) from organizations and can merge both of these entities. However, the customer parties being merged must be of the same party type. Thus, you can merge only individual customers (consumers) with individual customers (consumers). You can merge only organization customers with organization customers. The same is true for merging customer accounts for parties of different party types.
All of the requirements described in Merging Sites for the Same Customer and Merging Different Customers are true whether you are merging individuals or organizations.
Use the Duplicate Customer Report to see a list of all duplicate customers before you initiate the customer merge program. This report tries to match duplicate customer names based on the search criteria that you specify. See: Duplicate Customer Report.
To see active or inactive customer information, use the Customer Listing Detail and Summary reports. The Detail report displays contacts, addresses, and relationships for each customer you choose in your search criteria. The Summary report displays a list of your customers and their addresses.
If you have any of the following applications installed and you run customer merge, the system automatically merges all transactions associated with the merge candidates in those applications as well:
Customer Service
Federal Financials
Grants Accounting
Inventory
Master Scheduling /MRP Planning
Order Management
Payables
Pricing
Projects
Property Manager
Public sector financials
Purchasing
Quality
Shipping
Training Administration
When you merge customers, Customer Merge updates the customer information for all of the old customers transactions. For example, if you merge ACME with Customer XYZ, the program updates all of ACME's transactions with Customer XYZ's ship-to and bill-to information.
If you have custom tables in your AR account that have foreign keys to the HZ_CUST_ACCOUNTS, HZ_CUST_ACCTS_SITES, or HZ_CUST_SITE_USES_ALL table, you can use the package ARP_GENERIC_CMERGE to ensure that the foreign keys remain valid. This package needs to be modified to include your custom table names and foreign keys. Use the $AR_TOP/install/sql/arplbtrx.sql file as a guideline on how to modify this package.