11.5.10 to r12.1 upgrade, TCA issues/questions

Question

This is a fairly "advanced" r12 TCA question for the experts:
We are upgrading from EBS 11.5.10 to r12.
We also have a separate instance of EBS 11.5.10 in which we use "Oracle Customers Online" for our "CDH" (Customer Data Hub) that sends (spokes) party data to multiple subscribing systems. We are going to absorb this CDH instance into the upgraded r12 environment.
The r12 TCA upgrade takes all suppliers and creates NEW TCA structures for them (parties, sites, contacts, etc). Many of the suppliers overlap our customer parties in the real world (suppliers who are also customers). Additionally, these suppliers/customers have also been spoked to many other systems with the supplier segment1 + vendor_site_codes (same as our customer party_number/party_site_numbers).
1. We thought of merging the customers into the suppliers and then editing party_number/party_site_number to be the same as the original segment1 / vendor site_code, but ran into the following issues, of which the first below is most important:
-- r12 Upgrade makes ALL suppliers (regardless of vendor_type_lookup_code) into Party_Type 'ORGANIZATION', which cannot be merged with Customer Party_Type 'PERSON' parties....
-- Party site merges will not work if we don't have the EB Tax Geography MASTER_REF country/state/county/city/postal_code's defined for the hz_locations.
The party type issue above is important for existing data but also for new suppliers. PERSONs will never be able to merged in the future, between Suppliers and Customers in either direction.
For the sake of getting all these parties de-duped into single parties, I changed some of the supplier ORGANIZATION party_types to PERSON (and hence I also created an hz_person_profiles record using TCA api's). But after doing this, when we update the supplier through iSupplier Portal, it updates the underlying party_type back to ORGANIZATION. If I were to make this change, then merge PERSON customers into these Suppliers, and then a user updates the supplier data, then the whole party will get updated from PERSON to ORGANIZATION, which I think would be bad for our customer processing (and other modules in other spoke systems subscribing to party create/update events).
Also, if we are forced to leave suppliers separate from customers in case of PERSON entities, then I will especially have trouble trying to send a complete party definition to subscribing systems, since there are 2 parties instead of where there should be 1.
Any ideas about how to overcome this issue with r12 Suppliers integration with TCA ?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Hello
We are about to undertake a similar upgrade - can you let me know how you overcame this issue please?
Thanks