how to identify duplicate supplier records before a maritime system migration?

Duplicate marine supplier records can undermine data confidence in a maritime system migration by causing payment errors, fragmented spend visibility, and reconciliation problems across fleets; the most reliable approach is to identify duplicates before cutover using master data profiling, deterministic matching on key attributes, and documented survivorship rules.

How Duplicate Supplier Records Is Applied

• Profile and standardize supplier master data before matching: normalize spelling, punctuation, and casing for legal name, trading name, address lines, and tax identifiers; then confirm which fields are populated consistently across all fleets and entities.
• Run deterministic matching rules to flag likely duplicates in vendor master duplicates scenarios: match on tax ID or VAT/GST where available, then on a combination of legal name plus postal code, and finally on bank account identifiers where your governance allows it.
• Use fuzzy matching for variants to catch duplicates that differ by formatting: compare normalized names and addresses with controlled thresholds, and review clusters rather than single pairs to reduce false positives.
• Apply survivorship and governance to prevent duplicate suppliers in erp from migrating: define which record wins (for example, the one with the most complete payment terms, bank details, and active purchasing history), and lock the decision with an audit trail for IT and Finance.
• Validate the approach with an evidence-based sampling method and documented reconciliation checks; for records governance patterns, see National Archives guidance on records handling and reference practices.

Operational Impact

1. CFO and accounting control: reduces the risk of duplicate payments, duplicate accruals, and inconsistent vendor balances by ensuring supplier record consolidation happens before posting activity in the target system.
2. Procurement and spend visibility: improves cost allocation and reporting by preventing fragmented supplier master data, which otherwise splits spend across multiple IDs and complicates contract and PO analytics.
3. IT and migration governance: lowers migration exceptions and rework by resolving vendor master duplicates and duplicate supplier record clusters during data migration planning, rather than after cutover when dependencies (POs, invoices, GRNs, payment runs) are harder to unwind.

Important to know: Start with a data quality baseline and a small pilot on one fleet or one supplier category, then tune match thresholds and survivorship rules using Finance and Procurement sign-off; this is the fastest way to achieve data confidence while avoiding over-merging that could break historical accounting linkages.