Data Cleansing

You can merge duplicate records for accounts or employees into a single record and archive redundant records, ensuring that your data is as consistent as possible. Data records are merged in a data cleansing case.

To prevent creation of duplicate accounts, you can activate a duplicate check (see Duplicate Check for Accounts and Contacts) that informs users when they create or edit an account that is potentially a duplicate.

Note Note

You cannot merge employee records in SAP CRM if you have an integrated SAP ERP system in which you manage employees.

End of the note.

Prerequisites

Data Cleansing Cases

You activate and make basic settings for data cleansing in Customizing for Cross-Application Components, under Start of the navigation path SAP Business Partner Next navigation step Data Cleansing End of the navigation path .

The data cleansing function is delivered with default Customizing settings that determine which data is automatically merged and which data is displayed on the UI of the data cleansing case (WebClient UI) for selection. You can change this Customizing to meet your requirements. You do this in the SAP GUI transaction BUSWU02, which has the following view variants:

CLEARING: The dependent objects appear on the UI.
CLEAR_REP: The dependent objects do not appear on the UI, and are merged in the background.

You can make additional objects available as dependent objects. You do this in the SAP GUI transaction BUSWU01. If you add additional objects, you also have to make corresponding adjustments in the transaction BUSWU02.

You can also define that enhancements to accounts and employees that were made using the Application Enhancement Tool (AET) (see Application Enhancement Tool) should be included in the data merge. For more information, see SAP Note 2104164.

Merging of Business Partners

Merging of business partners, takes place as a scheduled job. To enable merging, you need to do the following:

Define the action profile BP_TASK.
You do this in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management, under Basic Functions Actions Actions in Transaction Change Actions and Conditions Define Action Profiles and Actions .
Configure and activate the action profile BP_TASK, and set up scheduling appropriately.
You do this in the above Customizing section, in the activity Define Conditions.
Assign the action profile BP_TASK to a task type.
You do this in Customizing for Customer Relationship Management, under Transactions Basic Settings Define Transaction Types .

Features

You can create cleansing cases as follows when processing accounts or employees:
From the search result list
You can select the accounts or employees that you want to merge and create a cleansing case.
When creating or editing an account or employee
If the duplicate check is activated for accounts (see Duplicate Check for Accounts and Contacts), a dialog box appears when a potentially duplicate account is identified. The similarity of the duplicate is shown in percent.
You can process cleansing cases immediately after creation or at a later point in time.
When creating a cleansing case, you provide the following details, which can serve as search criteria for cleansing cases:
- The person who is to process the data cleansing case.
- A priority, indicating to the processor how soon the case should be processed.
- A brief note, if necessary, for the person responsible about the data cleansing case.
You can merge more than two records into a single record.
Merging of records takes places as a schedule job in the background.
Redundant duplicate records are automatically marked for archiving.

More Information

For information about the procedure of merging data, see Merging Duplicate Accounts and Employees.