I’m curious how other ERP practitioners are handling duplicate customer records when sales data is coming from multiple sources — ERP customer master, distributor reports, EDI feeds, rep files, and manual spreadsheets.
In manufacturing/distribution environments, I’ve seen the same customer show up under different names, ship-to addresses, abbreviations, parent accounts, or distributor-specific naming conventions. That creates problems when leadership wants clean reporting by customer, territory, product line, or year-over-year sales.
My current thinking is that the fix usually requires a combination of customer master governance, standardized naming rules, cross-reference tables, and periodic reconciliation between ERP and external sales files. The hard part is keeping it from turning into spreadsheet archaeology — which, as we all know, is where good data goes to wear a tiny fedora and disappear.
For those of you working in ERP, operations, finance, or reporting:
How are you managing customer duplication and distributor data reconciliation in your environment? Are you using native ERP tools, BI/data warehouse logic, manual review, third-party cleanup tools, or some kind of MDM process?
I’d love to hear what has actually worked in the real world — especially in manufacturing, medical device, wholesale distribution, or Sage/NetSuite/SAP-type environments.