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Siebel – Merge Records – Checklist

by Nitin Jain

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I call this Part III, and concluding part of a series of my posts on the Merge Records functionality in Siebel CRM. You may want to take a look at the previous 2 parts below:
Siebel – Merge Records functionality
Siebel – Automating Merging Records by script – II

Though this looks like a very interesting and useful utility from the face of it, it can be dangerous too.

If you decide to go ahead with this functionality for 2 records, I doubt if there is a way you can recover both the records once again. This is the most dangerous aspect that I see with the automation concept we discussed in Part II of the Merge Records series of posts.

I also came across a few more issues with the Merge Records functionality. I am penning them down here.

Bookshelf says, when the two records are merged, only the top level, or at most top 2 level records are merged. This is particularly important concept if we consider the case of merging the Account records, for example. We could have contacts and their activities associated with these two Account Records. As per the Bookshelf, only the Account and Contact records should have merged. However, from the face of it, it seems, the Activities records also merge practically.

When we merge two records, Duplicate records are created on the MVG based fields. For eg. merging Person A record with Person B record, would create two records under the Language MVG even if both the original contacts had the same value for Language. The only suggested solution is to remove the duplicate records through scripts (Baad solution proposed, I must say!).

Single value fields are not updated after the Merge Records process. Merge Record process updates the child records by means of Links and Joins based on the Foreign Key fields. Siebel recommends the use of “Data Quality” Siebel OOB functionality. It is available under the head, Administration – Data Quality.

Position records are not merged when mergin Contact records. How could Siebel miss out on such important stuff.

And many more….

The more I explored about it, the more interested I got in the complete MergeRecord functionality. Try running a simple search on Metalink with the Search String, “Merge Records”. I am sure you would become interested, too.

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