A couple weeks ago Veeranna Battula introduced CRM Expert readers to useful functions for merging and deleting duplicate business partners in SAP CRM. But what about those times when you can’t merge duplicates? Perhaps you’ve acquired tens of thousands of the things over the years, and don’t have the time or money to invest in the massive MDM project that removing them would entail. Perhaps you’re dealing with external or legacy systems that don’t play well with SAP CRM. Or perhaps your company simply has good reasons for wanting to keep certain records separate from others.

Despite these reasons, duplicates will still inconvenience employees looking at customer records that are split among multiple records. What happens when customer service has an angry customer on the line and can't find all of their records? So this week on CRM Expert, Abhishek Srivastava proposes a solution on the user interface level:

“Consider a scenario in which an account search by name returns 100 records from which to choose. Identifying the right account and confirming the record are time-consuming tasks for users. In such cases, a preview screen helps the user visualize the linkages and relationships before confirming the account. You can integrate this preview functionality as a new column in the standard search page, which has a link for each customer.”

For more about creating this preview screen and linking business partner duplicates without merging them, CRM Expert subscribers can read the full article right here on ILN.