Party Merge in r12

Receivable Manager > Customer > Party Merge

 


As per TCA model,each party can have multiple customer accounts and you might chose to merge two of those. This is customer (account) merge as discussed in last post.
Within TCA model, the concept of “Customer” is separated into two layers: the Party layer and the Account layer

• CRM applications are referring to the Party layer when they refer to “Customer”
• Other applications, on the other hand, are considering to the Account layer, when they refer to “Customer”

Party Merge

This utilities can provide these functionality in EBS:

• Consolidate Duplicate parties or party sites
• Merge an acquired party into the acquiring party
• Combine duplicate party site for a party

If you have multiple party like ABC in the system and you determine that there has to be only one, you can use party merge to merge the duplicate parties into the one that you think is the original.

When you create a merge batch with parties to merge, you can also define the merge of entities from the merge-from and merge-to parties, including:

• Party sites
• Party relationships
• Organization contacts

You can also view party profile attributes of the merge-from and merge-to parties.

Party Merge or Account Merge - which one to pick
Party and Account merge are two distinct processes. As such, merging an Account does not automatically merge the parties and vice versa.
There is not a specific rule (Account first or Party first). This depends upon the situation.Here are few cases:

• If want to merge some accounts (Only the accounts), will not have to run Party merge
• If want to merge installed based records (CRM application) can only merge account if they are under the same party. If this case, needs to run party merge first, then all the account will be under the same party. Afterwards, can run party merge.
• If are using only party information and want to merge those, will not run account merge
• If want to move some accounts (belonging to a party) to another party then need to run only party merge

What is the difference between Transfer and Merge function in Party Merge?
Here is what Metalink Note:270032.1 documented.
Lets assume there are parties A and B. They have sites (addresses) AS and BS respectively. And there are transactions (invoices and orders) hanging from AS as well as BS. We are merging A into B. (A is the From and B is the To.)
A -> AS -> AST
B -> BS -> BST
TRANSFER - AS (address) will now point to B instead of A. The transactions from AS stay as is, so now they are eventually part of B. Party B now has 2 sites (addresses). The transactions (invoices and orders etc) remain attached to each site as they were before the merge.
B -> BS -> BST
-> AS -> AST
MERGE- AS will be marked with status M (address is deleted). Transactions from AS will be repointed to BS. Party B still has only 1 address. This (BS) address has all of the transactions (invoices and orders etc) that belonged to both addresses before the merge.
B -> BS -> BST
| -------> AST

• A TRANSFER allows you to keep an existing SITE (address) on the FROM party.
• A MERGE deletes the SITE and moves the transactions (invoices, orders, etc) to an existing site of the TO party.