I’ve been dealing with this problem for years, but I haven’t found any solution.
It’s pretty hard to describe without showing, but I believe that our CRM implementation from years ago was corrupt and we have been carrying it with us ever since.
Duplicate Customer/Ship To Contacts
In many of my customers, I see repeated contacts of the same entity have been added many times.
Not an uncommon problem. I beleive this occurs in either quote or order entry. Ive never narrowed down the exact circumstances, but I think it happens when a name is typed into the attn dropdown, instead of selected from the dropdown, or something equally ridiculous as that. Instead of using the existing contact it creates a new one.
I imagine you could make a data directive on the CustCon table that checks if the same person contact already exists for the customer num. In terms of cleaning ip the existing ones you’re only option is to mark the duplicates inactive.
We did exactly that. Epicor won’t allow duplicate names to be “Added” but it will let you change the PerCon after the fact, even if it already exist. They need a feature to merge Customer Contacts, something like Salesforce has.
I’ve triggered this behavior in our test environment by adding a new contact within the quote entry form.
A new contact gets created with a separate PerCon ID if the name is keyed in.
A new contact gets created with the same PerCon ID if the PerCon ID is keyed in.
Hope this helps as it took me awhile to figure out where exactly this was coming from.
Epicor doesn’t consider that a Bug. I’ve reported that back in 2014… I wonder if its the same.
RESPONSE FROM DEVELOPMENT:
From Development: "… we can’t assume that John Smith for one customer is the same John Smith for another customer, based only on the name (considering that there might be many people with the same name or they could be typed differently)."
I guess perhaps they think when you key in the name its a new “John Smith” (a company could have 10 John Smiths)
@hkeric.wci - But this is adding a contact for the same customer, not a new one… I thought there was a pop-up where names matched and Epicor tried to give a warning? Or was that for an entire new customer, not just a contact?
