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Merge Procedure Advice?

Beth Hawryluk
$organization

Hi all,

We've always had a good number of failed merges each week due to the good ole "activity happened on the kept account" error. Sometimes I can see that something physically happened and so the error is legitimate (not that I always agree with it failing the merge because of that... but that's a different story). I also noticed a while ago that the LP_CUSTOMER_RANK was causing a lot of unwanted activity. Since we don't currently use ranking I disabled it which kind of helped.

But I find myself looking into this issue again as we've still been having a crazy number of merges failing each week and most of them are consistently the same people. This is what I've found and I'm looking for some advice on what other people have done.

The majority of the failures seem to be happening because of our nightly Manage Constituency updates. It's funny because most of these people have had the constituency for several months and the last_update_dt in TX_CONST_CUST is from several months ago. But their last_update_dt in T_CUSTOMER is for the exact time of the last constituency update run. How have other people gotten around this? Should I stop using the Manage Constituencies report and write up LPs to apply constituencies that don't modify the account unnecessarily?

This also leads me to wonder how I'll handle the ranking procedure and merges when we start using ranking in the future...

Thanks for any advice!

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  • $organization

    Two options that occur to me on this problem, Beth:

    • Increase the frequency of the merge process so it runs nightly, and schedule the constituency utility to run after the merge process.
    • Decrease the frequency of the constituency utility to weekly, and schedule it to run after the merge process.

    Some organization prefer a week's worth of time to work on merges, and slowing down the constituency process might not make sense for data accuracy, but just wanted to throw those out there.

    -Michael Wilcox, Tessitura Network

  • $organization in reply to Michael Flaherty-Wilcox

    Hi Michael,

    Thanks for chiming in! Due to the nature of the constituencies we're maintaining nightly, the second option wouldn't work well for us. The first one wouldn't be ideal but it is something we can definitely take into consideration. Our merging staff do enjoy the luxury of having a week to schedule and check the merges but perhaps daily isn't unrealistic. I'll discuss it with them and see how they feel about it.

    Thanks!

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  • $organization in reply to Michael Flaherty-Wilcox

    Hi Michael,

    Thanks for chiming in! Due to the nature of the constituencies we're maintaining nightly, the second option wouldn't work well for us. The first one wouldn't be ideal but it is something we can definitely take into consideration. Our merging staff do enjoy the luxury of having a week to schedule and check the merges but perhaps daily isn't unrealistic. I'll discuss it with them and see how they feel about it.

    Thanks!

Children
  • $organization in reply to Beth Hawryluk

    Sounds great! One last thing I'll throw out there for anyone else handling this problem (apologies if you already know this tip): If you have a duplicate constituent who you suspect will be affected by the last_activity_dt issue, typing the ID numbers directly into the Merge Constituents screen rather than using "Potential Duplicates" will override the restriction on last_activity_dt and allow the merge to proceed.

    -Michael