Hello,
I'm looking to receive guidance from consortia regarding the merge process. We are migrating data for two new consortium members into our existing DB. If anyone has any tips for how best to handle the merge process for a consortium, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Thank you,
Shereen
Hi Shereen,
We are a consortium of 4 organizations. We allow each organization to schedule merges. The merges take place in a scheduled job weekly. The person scheduling the merge is required to enter a CSI if it is a shared record (i.e. in a nutshell, a record with activity in the last 3 years or so for two or more organizations). No merges are allowed to be scheduled after 1pm on Fridays to allow time for a review process.
Before the weekly merge process, our ticketing functional support staff reviews the list of scheduled merges. They first validate to make sure the pair really are duplicates based on name/address type of data. In the past, they would manually look at records for potential issues that would need to be resolved before the merge could take place, like changes to memberships. So it was fairly time-consuming.
We are in the process of finishing up customizations to the lp_validate_cust_merge procedure to trap issues upfront rather than relying on someone to manually review. It specifically looks for situations where we do not want a merge to take place, and reports what it found as specifically as possible to the user trying to schedule the merge. The weekly review of scheduled merges by our ticketing functional support team will be much easier and quicker now. We expect to go live with this in June.
I hope this is helpful!
Thanks,David
Hello David,
Thank you for your reply. Yes, as I'm testing the process, I see that it can be time consuming. I'm very interested in the customized process you're rolling out. Could you let me know how it goes? I'd like to discuss the process in more detail with you if possible.
Thanks again,