AI Cleanup Suggestions for Companies
The AI cleanup suggestions page lets administrators tidy up the company list with the help of AI. Run an analysis, then accept or reject each proposed change: duplicate companies merged, misspelled names corrected, and unused placeholder entries deleted. The AI only proposes; nothing is applied until you confirm.
Opening the page
Open the Companies page from the main menu and click AI cleanup suggestions in the toolbar above the company list. The button is only visible to users who may manage companies and industries, the same permission that allows editing and merging companies by hand.
Running an analysis
Click Run AI analysis in the toolbar to open the confirmation dialog, then confirm with Run analysis.
The dialog offers one option, unticked by default:
- Don't suggest removing customers in merges: a company marked as a customer is never proposed as the one that gets merged away. Merges into a customer are still proposed, and typo fixes for customers are unaffected. Where both companies of a duplicate pair are customers, no merge is suggested at all and you merge them by hand if you want to.
The option applies to the run you are starting, not as a permanent setting, and it starts unticked every time you open the dialog. While such an analysis is running, the progress card states that customers are protected.
The analysis runs in the background and can take several minutes depending on how many companies you have, and you can safely leave the page and come back later. When it finishes, the page updates on its own and an Analysis complete message tells you how many suggestions are waiting, or that nothing was found. The message only appears while you are on the page during the run; it does not wait for you.
Note: Running a new analysis discards every current pending suggestion and replaces it with a fresh set. Accepted and rejected suggestions are kept.
Background analyses for newly added companies
Every newly added company is checked by the AI automatically, with no manual action needed. This covers companies created by hand, brought in by the CV parser, and added while a resource request is imported. Suggestions from these background checks appear in the pending list alongside those from a manual analysis.
Note: A background check always analyses with customer merges allowed. Don't suggest removing customers in merges applies only to the manual run you ticked it on. Companies that were already in your list before this feature was released are not checked automatically; run a manual analysis once to cover them.
Reviewing pending suggestions
Once the analysis finishes, suggestions appear in the table. Each row describes one proposed change to one company. If the last analysis found nothing to clean up, the table says so instead of asking you to run another one, because a clean company list produces no suggestions at all.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Company | The company the suggestion is about: the one that will be renamed, merged away, or deleted. Click the name to open the impact drawer. |
| Customer | Whether the company is currently marked as a customer. Worth a closer look before accepting a merge that would remove it. |
| Change | The type of change being suggested (see the table below). |
| Suggested on | The date the analysis proposed this change. |
| Projects | How many project references currently point at this company. |
| Bookings | How many bookings currently point at this company. |
| Current value | The company's current name. Merge suggestions show a dash here, because the whole company is affected rather than one field. |
| Suggested value | What the AI proposes: the surviving company for a merge, or the corrected name for a typo fix. A deletion has no suggested value and shows a dash. For a merge you can click it to inspect that company too. |
| Reason | A short explanation, in your interface language, of why the AI made this suggestion. |
| Actions | Accept applies the change. Reject moves the suggestion to the rejected list. |
The list shows the newest suggestions first by default. The column shows only the date, but rows from the same run are still ordered by the exact time the AI proposed them. You can sort by Company, Customer or Suggested on, and filter and sort by Customer, Change, Projects and Bookings. For example, filter to Customer: Yes to review everything that touches a customer first, or sort by Projects to work through the biggest impacts.
Suggestion types
| Type | What it does |
|---|---|
| Merge into | The company in the Company column is merged into the company in Suggested value. Everything that referenced it (projects, bookings, profiles, CVs, trainings, resource requests, proposals and reference presentations) is rewritten to point at the surviving company, and the merged-away company is deleted. This also covers the case where one entry is only the broad group-level name of another (for example Siemens alongside Siemens Energy AG): the generic entry is the one that goes. |
| Fix typo | The company is renamed to the corrected spelling. Nothing else changes. |
| Delete | The company is deleted. Only proposed for entries that are clearly leftovers (see below). |
Deletion is proposed sparingly, and only when every one of these is true: nothing at all references the company (no projects, profiles, bookings, CVs, trainings, resource requests, proposals or reference presentations), it is not marked as a customer, it is not linked to the standard company catalogue, no one has filled in a registered name, website, company code, industry, logo or alias, and the AI judges the name to carry no information: a placeholder or test entry (Test GmbH, Musterfirma), a keyboard mash (asdf), digits only, or an empty name. The AI is instructed to err on the side of keeping: a name with one plausible real word, like Kunde Meier GmbH, is not junk. If any reference to the company appears after the analysis, or someone fills in any of its details in the meantime, accepting is refused and you are asked to run a new analysis.
Whether a name is misspelled is the AI's judgement alone. It is instructed to propose a correction only for an obvious typing mistake that still denotes the same company, and to stay silent when it is unsure. Similar-looking names are usually two different companies, so review a typo fix before accepting it. A correction into a name another company already holds becomes a merge rather than a rename, and there the misspelled entry is the one that goes.
For a merge, the AI confirms that two entries are the same company and may also name which of the two names is the better catalogue entry: correctly spelled, properly capitalized, the official form. Which company survives is then decided in a fixed order: a company that has a company code always survives, because the merge deletes the other entry and the code is what other systems identify it by; then a company marked as a customer; below that, the better name the AI singled out, but only when keeping it costs no data, so an entry that is more completely filled in, or the only one linked to the standard company catalogue, survives regardless of its name; then the catalogue link, the number of references pointing at it, how completely it is filled in, and finally which entry is older. Two exceptions override this: the broad group-level entry of a pair always goes, and where the AI found a misspelling of a name another company already holds, the misspelled entry is the one that goes.
No merge is ever proposed that would delete a company holding a code. Where both entries of a pair have one, no merge is suggested at all, and you decide by hand which code to give up. The same applies where one of the two exceptions above would otherwise remove the coded entry, for example when the coded company is the broad group-level name, or the one carrying the misspelling. Codes added after an analysis are caught as well: accepting a suggestion whose company gained a code in the meantime is refused, and you are asked to run a new analysis.
Accepting or rejecting
- Accept applies the proposed change immediately. A merge is permanent: the merged-away company is deleted and every reference is rewritten, with no undo. A deletion is permanent too. If a framework agreement, servicesheet or order turns out to reference the company, the deletion is refused, so merge the company into another one instead.
- Reject moves the suggestion to the rejected list, where you can restore it later.
If the company changed after the analysis ran, because someone renamed it, deleted it, marked it as a customer, or the suggested name has since been taken by another company, accepting is refused and you are asked to run a new analysis. This protects you from applying a proposal that was made against out-of-date data.
Company impact drawer
Click a company name in any row to open a side drawer showing what the change would affect. The drawer is read-only and always shows the current state, not the state at suggestion time.
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| Projects | How many project references point at the company, with a few examples linked by name. |
| Bookings | How many bookings point at the company, with a few examples linked by booking code. |
| Audit | When the company was created and when it was last edited. |
Project and booking examples are links: open one to see the full record, provided you have permission to view it. For merge suggestions the drawer also states which company will be deleted once the merge is applied; for a deletion it states that the company will be deleted and that nothing references it.
Viewing and restoring rejected suggestions
Toggle Show rejected in the toolbar to switch to the rejected list. Each row shows the same columns plus a Revert action that moves the suggestion back to pending.
Note: Reverting only restores the suggestion to pending, so you still need to Accept it to apply the change. If the same suggestion has meanwhile been proposed again by a newer analysis, revert is refused; act on the pending one instead.
Recovering from a failed analysis
If an analysis fails, the page shows a red banner with a Retry analysis button. If an analysis appears stuck for more than a day without making progress, the running card surfaces a Restart analysis link instead. Use it to discard the stuck run and start fresh. A long analysis that is still working is left alone.
What a merge keeps
A merge never drops a detail that only one of the two companies had. The surviving company keeps everything it has filled in itself, and inherits every field it left empty (registered name, alias, website, industry, logo and the standard-catalogue link) from the company being merged away. Where both have a value, the survivor's wins. The company code is not in that list: a company holding one is never the entry that gets merged away, so there is never a code to carry over.
Two settings are carried over in the more protective direction instead, so a merge can never quietly loosen them:
- if either company had customer data export switched off, the surviving company keeps it off;
- if either company was marked as a customer, the surviving company stays marked as one.
Everything that pointed at the merged-away company is rewritten to the survivor, including its place in saved search requirements and in framework agreements, servicesheets and orders.
Disclaimer: This feature uses Artificial Intelligence (AI). While AI improves data quality significantly, it may not always interpret your data flawlessly. Always review each suggestion before accepting, especially merges, which cannot be undone.