detect potential duplicate vendor master records

Hi all,

Our external auditor has the following comment:

'Match codes and message control can be used to help identify duplicate vendor records. Fields such as “Name”, “Address” and “Country” can be set as searchable fields in order to detect potential duplicate vendor records. The message control (with identifier “144”) in SAP can give a message prompt when duplicate vendors are identified.

We noted that your system had not been configured to display a warning message if the name or address, etc of a new record is identical to an existing vendor record.'

Any idea to implement this?

I searched for message 144 and found that there is a similar message in message class F2: 'Vendors found with same address; check', but I cannot find where to trigger this error message.

Please help.

Best Regards,

Chris.