How do I get rid of duplicate employees on my instance? – PPO Support Portal

Sometimes the same employee is inadvertently added more than once on PPO. Most commonly this happens because the administrator fails to disable the global employee filter and verify that the employee does not already exist as an inactive employee before adding the employee. Having duplicate employees causes confusion, especially if the employee is also a user on PPO.

The solution is twofold:

We have to correct the duplicates that have already been added; and
We have to prevent duplicates from being added in the future.

Current duplicates

The problem with the existing duplicates is that some Tasks / Issues / Risks may be assigned to the original employee and others may be assigned to the duplicate. The first step in correcting the duplicates is to first ensure all items on the system are assigned to the same employee record. The easiest way to do this would be to edit one of the employee records and put a 1 at the end of the person’s first name:

Then go to the Task List page, Issue List page and Risk List page and filter the page to show the items assigned to the duplicate employee (in this example, the employee with the 1 at the end of his name). Edit these records and assign them to the employee without the 1.

Once all of the Tasks, Issues and Risks have been reassigned to the original employee, the Home Page for the duplicate employee should be empty.

You can then edit the duplicate employee’s record and mark them as inactive, causing them to be hidden from all employee lists.

If the employee in question is a user on PPO, you will have to check the user record for the employee to ensure it is linked to the correct (original) employee.

If the user is linked to the duplicate record (in this example, the employee with the 1 at the end of his name) simply edit the user record and change the employee to the correct (original) employee.

Preventing duplicates

There are two options in terms of prevention:

Limit the users in terms of who has access to add employees. For some organisations it would be viable to only allow the PPO Administrators to load employees. The administrator can then ensure the employee they are creating is not a duplicate, before continuing. If the employee does exist, but as an inactive employee, the PPO Administrator should mark the employee as active.
We can implement a custom validation rule that prevents users from adding a second employee with the same e-mail address. This validation rule is run across active and inactive employees, and searches whether the employee’s email address you are trying to add is unique. If it is unique, the system will allow the new employee to be added. If it is not unique, the system will prompt you to search for the employee under the Inactive employees and mark them as active. This would prevent duplicate employees from being added.
All PPO instances post July 2020 will be provisioned with this business rule already in place.

An exception to the rule

PPO Administrators can add exceptions to the validation rule if required. This is typically used to allow certain dummy e-mail addresses e.g. leavers@yourdomain.com which is associated with multiple employee records.

Please refer to the following knowledge base article for more detail on how to add exceptions or conditions to business rules.