Party Merge provides the capability to merge parties and their related entities in the TCA Registry, eliminating duplicate data in the Registry. Because the TCA Registry shares information across the E-Business Suite, you must maintain the quality of the data in the Registry. Duplicate data can reduce the efficiency and accuracy of your party processing and reports.
With Party Merge, you can:
Consolidate duplicate parties or party sites.
For example, you can merge Vision Corp. into Vision Corporation.
Merge duplicate party sites for a party.
Note: Even though you can also use Party Merge to integrate an acquired party into the acquiring party, Party Merge is primarily for finding and resolving duplicates. Before using Party Merge for mergers and acquisitions, you must fully test and prepare for the results of merging.
For example, after merge, all existing transactions are repointed to the surviving party. You cannot reconcile transactions or audit transactions details for the acquired party, or reprint invoices for that party. If you still need to perform various tasks for the acquired party, you might not want to merge it into the acquiring party.
In Party Merge, merge batches are sets of parties or party sites to merge, and the Party Merge process runs on one merge at a time. A merge batch determines the records involved in the merge as well as the general outcome of the merge.
When you submit parties or party sites for merge, the Party Merge process runs as a concurrent request to complete the actual merge. You can review the log to check the results and any errors that might have occurred.
To identify the duplicate parties to include in a merge batch, you can:
Use batch duplicate identification to automatically find batches of duplicates. See: Batch Duplicate Identification Overview.
Manually determine and enter the duplicates into merge batches in Party Merge.
In addition to Party Merge, you can use the Customer Account Merge feature to merge transactions from a source customer account to a target customer account. After the merge-from account is merged into the merge-to account, you can either inactivate or delete the source customer account. See: Merging Customers.
Your administrator can set up Party Merge. See: Setting Up Party Merge.
The Party Merge process involves four procedures to resolve duplicate parties and party sites in the TCA Registry: