What is the impact of party merge on all Oracle Fusion applications?

What is a party?

A party, in the Oracle Fusion Customer Data Model, is an entity that can enter into a business relationship, such as buying and selling, and can be of the type Organization, Person, or Group. A party exists separately from any business relationship that it enters into with another party. For example, Vision Corp could be a party within the customer data model. However, Vision Corp can be simultaneously a supplier to its customers and a buyer or customer to its suppliers.

What is party merge?

Party merge is one of the two ways of resolving duplicate records of business entities, the other being linking the parties. You can merge two or more duplicate parties by creating a merge duplicate resolution request. During merge these parties are combined into one primary record. After the merge request is completed, you can update only the master record. The merged duplicate records are also called non-master records. Note that merge supports the transfer of attachments from duplicate records to a master record.

How does party merge impact the different roles and relationships of a party across Oracle Fusion applications?

When you merge parties, the related child entities that get merged include party relationships, contact information, party profiles, customer accounts, and information obtained from third-party sources. Note that you can only merge parties with the same party type. This implies that an organization can only be merged with another organization, a person with a person, and so on. In the case of parties and customer accounts, if you find duplicate parties, you should determine if duplicate customer accounts also exist. When two customer accounts are merged and the corresponding parties are verified as duplicates, the parties can be merged. When two parties are merged and the corresponding customer accounts are verified as duplicates, the customer accounts can be merged. Similarly, you can merge organization contacts between parties that you are merging.

When do deployments perform party merges?

An example of when you perform party merges is during mergers and acquisitions. The Customer Data Management functionality of Oracle CX Sales acts as the customer master during Integration Cloud Service based integration between different cloud services (also known as spoke systems). You can use Customer Data Management to cleanse, consolidate, and share customer data across integrated cloud services.

Example of a party merge

This section explains how the duplicate resolution capability of the Customer Data Management functionality merges records across integrated cloud services, for example, how it merges an Oracle CX Sales and Fusion Service account or contact with an Oracle Service Cloud account or contact.

Party Merge Impacts Across Applications

Many applications are impacted by party merges. Here is a list of applications and how they are impacted by party merges:

Sales

What happens to custom objects in Sales, if they refer to Organizations?

The following information merges with the master party record:

Information about a product in which the party is interested
Information about sales leads associated with a party
Information about the contact associated with the sales lead
Forecast information for opportunities associated with a party
Information about sales opportunities associated with a party
Sales credits assigned to partner identified by the party
Associations between a party contact and opportunity
Information about competitors that exist for a sales opportunity
Employee access to a party, opportunity and lead
Changes to the parties and lead information that has been modified by a territory definition
Information about the current environment of a party

The following information transfers to the master party record:

Customer account plan information

Service

What happens to custom objects in Sales, if they refer to Organizations?

The following information merges with the master party record:

Service request information associated with parties
Service request incident location
Audit information for service requests
Contact point for a service request that is associated with a party
Any party site used on a charge line
Any site and site use that is associated to a party for a service request

Validations

If a service request has more than one contact, these contacts are merged. If duplicate contact points exist for the two contacts that were merged, and these duplicate contact points are then merged, it could result in duplicate records in CS_HZ_SR_CONTACT_POINTS. In this case, the duplicate records are deleted.

Partner Management

The following information merges with the master account record:

Partner referrals and deal registrations