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Administrator Guide
Last Updated: 2023-06-23
Setup Considerations: Duplicate Management

Setup Considerations: Duplicate Management

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration and use of duplicate management. It explains:
  • Why to set it up.
  • How it fits into the rest of Workday.
  • Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.
  • Security requirements and business process configurations.
  • Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.
Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

Duplicate management is a framework that enables you to find and merge records for persons with duplicate records in your Workday tenant.

Business Benefits

Duplicate management enables you to:
  • Save time and money by eliminating confusion associated with multiple records for the same person.
  • Simplify record management by having a single record for an individual.
  • Increase efficiency by automatically merging duplicate records.
  • Lower your maintenance costs as a result of fewer records to manage.

Use Cases

  • Set up rules to match persons based on personal data and contact information.
  • Review potential duplicate records and examine each one to gain insight about the data.
  • Enable automatic merges for persons who match exactly on specific criteria such as email address or date of birth.
  • Merge multiple records at once and remove multiple duplicate records at once.
  • Merge various combinations of person types.

Questions to Consider

Questions
Considerations
After you merge 2 records, do you need to take any action on the source records?
Once you merge a source person to a target person, you can no longer take action on the source, except to unmerge it.
How do you determine the source and target person for the merge?
Workday determines the source and target based on the hierarchy of person types. Workday sets the highest person type in the hierarchy as the target.
Does the data associated with the target person remain the same?
No. Workday compares each personal data field and determines which data to keep or append.
Why does Workday prevent some merges?
Workday prevents merges when:
  • Workday doesn't support the person-type combination for merge.
  • The source person has an in-progress event.
Are additional configuration steps required to set up the duplicate management framework in other functional areas in Workday?
Review the Workday Administrator Guide for information on setting up duplicate management in Workday Recruiting and Workday Student.

Recommendations

Before you adopt the Duplicate Management Framework, we recommend that you formulate real-world test scenarios where you might find duplicate records.
Test different match rules and different numbers of match rules to determine the volume of duplicate records in your tenant.
Evaluate if the rules surface duplicates for different person types in your tenant based on your match criteria.
Analyze your test data to determine the state of the data in your tenant. This information can help you set a schedule for running the find duplicates job.

Requirements

You must opt in to the Duplicate Management Framework.

Limitations

  • You can't merge all combinations of person types.
  • You can't automatically merge a chain of duplicate records.

Tenant Setup

By opting in to the Duplicate Management Framework, you:
  • Implement a tenant-wide change that you can't repeat or undo.
  • Automatically opt out of the legacy match and merge functionality in Workday Recruiting and Workday Student.

Security

Configure these domains in the Duplicate Management functional area before you opt in to Duplicate Management:
Domain
Considerations
Manage: Duplicate Records for a Person
Enables constrained and unconstrained access to identify and manage duplicate records.
Manage: Duplicate Records for the Tenant
Enables unconstrained access to identify and manage duplicate records.
Set Up: Duplicate Management
Enables administrators to set up match rules and schedule match jobs.

Business Processes

No impact.

Reporting

Report
Considerations
Manage Duplicate Records
Enables you to view duplicate pairs based on your match rules and to take action on the record. You can merge records or remove duplicate records.
For Mass Actions, the limits are:
  • Merge Records: 1000 records.
  • Remove as Duplicate: 10,000 records.
Manage Merged Records
Enables you to view merged records and to unmerge them.
Manage Removed Records
Enables you to view the details of all removed duplicate pairs based on you configured match rules.
View Automatic Merge Job Details
Enables you to view the details of the most recent automatic merge job, including the number of records automatically merged, and reasons for prevented automatic merges.
View Scheduled Runs for Find Duplicates
Enables you to view jobs set to run in the future.

Integrations

No impact.

Connections and Touchpoints

Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.