By the Way, what you are asking for is a customer (in this case, vendor) unification software routine, something that companies like Dunn & Bradstreet and Group One make BIG bucks selling to companies like yours, especially those who have merged several times over the past few years and have never gotten around to scrubbing their customer lists of duplicates.
Some things you may want to consider that the big guys use....first of all, establish a point value for matches and an safety threshhold you can tolerate for mismatches. A vendor who matches on phone number might be an immediate acceptance. Or one whose name matches pretty closely and has the same zip code. Or street address and city match. Or Federal Tax ID number. Anyway, you get the idea.
Those companies I mentioned above have artificial intelligence routines that look for close matches and award points for the degree of closeness. You, as their customer, decide how much risk you are willing to take as far as improperly combining vendors who are actually different. Some companies simply print all the scores for those which match closely and let someone from customer service (or purchasing in your case) make the actual decision.
Best of Luck.
Sometimes the grass is greener on the other side because there is more manure there - original.
