Contact Duplication

ifonly

Nav 2009 R2

Hello, As we have imported Thousands of Contacts via Data Migration, we have a number of Contacts that are duplicated.

We have setup the Duplication Search String to look for the first & last 5 letters of the name & first 4 letters of the Post Code (We are in the UK) & this brings through 14000 entry's in the duplication table which we need to review.

What we had hoped was to give this information to a Third Party Company to DeDup the Contact Table, clean up the Data - i.e. Add missing Telephone numbers, Ltd, Plc information & then be able to import this back into Nav, but we have found that the Third Party would not be able to see if any potential duplicated Contact actually had Flow Fields populated against them, i.e. Opportunity's, interactions, To-Do's so they want us to clean the Contacts Table before they can add their extra information.

My questions are, has anyone else had to go through this exercise, if so how:-

Internally or through a Third Party?

Any suggestions for best practice on this or how to setup the Duplication Search String any differently to produce accurate results?

thanks

skulla

We have done similar kind of process to one of our clients where they defined what is duplicate then we have created a process report to update contacts and to move todo's and interactions from contact to another contact and delete duplicate ones.

ifonly

Interesting, so the Customer has to identify which is the duplicate & give a report of what to delete & what to keep & then you can clean up the data?

ara3n

if you want to keep the history for both contacts, I suggest to merge the contacts.

Here is a how to. You can do it for contact as well.


viewtopic.php?f=5&t=15580&hilit=merge+customer+vendor

ifonly

@ara3n This looks like it is using code, i'm an end user & would now know where to start with this?

ara3n

Ask your partner to look at the example code and build a solution around it. It should take about an hour to build it for merging contacts.

skulla

No, the customer did not provide us the list of contacts, they defined some parameters to look For example the last name and Zip Code is same......., it is kind of a merge tool how Rashed mentioned we just merged two contacts based on that criteria.