Duplicate sales orders are a problem, particularly in business-to-business mail orders. You may, for example, receive an order over the phone followed by a confirmation fax. These may be inadvertently treated as two separate orders. If this is not corrected, it can lead to unnecessary handling, shipping costs, and returns. But you can have the system track down and correct these errors before they go out the door.

SAP Retail can search for all sales documents that have the same customer, currency, and total value of the order. From this list you can select pairs of documents and have R/3 drill down into the individual line items. If at least one of the line items differs between the two orders, the system will automatically let both orders proceed. If, on the other hand, the line items are all identical, you can then examine the individual sales and choose which one you want to remove (for example, if one order has been partially delivered and the other has not, you would want to remove the one that has not yet been processed). This way you can catch unintentional duplication at an early stage and thereby reduce the frequency of merchandise returns.

When you run the duplicate order report, the system will list all the sales documents matching the criteria you have selected. Next to each customer, there will be either a green or yellow button:

• A green button indicates that there are no duplicate sales documents.

• A yellow button indicates that one or more sales documents for this customer have the same currency and total order value.

For each customer with a yellow button, you can further expand the list to show all sales documents. Individual sales orders will now have either a green or yellow button. Again, the yellow button indicates a possible duplication.

You can select any two - and only two - sales documents at a time, then press a button to have the system do a further analysis of the two. If the items within the sales documents are different, the yellow button will become green, indicating that there are no problems. But if all items match completely, a red button appears. You can then click on each of the sales documents to examine them, then decide which of the two to remove.