Symptom
You have created two Business Partners with same name and would like to know, whether one of the Business Partner can be deleted?
Resolution
In Principle, a Business Partner is a Master Data and it can not be removed from the system. Because these datas are intended to be used in other business transactions (CRM, HCM and so on) and deleting these datas will result in inconsistency in those documents. Hence the system is designed in such way that you cannot delete these datas but you are allowed to Block or Obsolete these datas.
Here is the evaluation of status of Business Partner:
In Preparation: It is not possible to use the Business Partner in any other business transaction documents.
Active: All business documents are allowed to create references with this status value. This status value is a prerequisite for the consistency of the reference.
Blocked: Business documents are only allowed to create new references with this status when they can save inconsistent data.
In contrast, if the Business documents which already have a reference to a meanwhile blocked Business Partner can finish their process / do not need to change their behavior.
Obsolete: It is not allowed to create references to Business Partner with this status because the intention of this status value is that the Business partner gets archived.
So, you can block the status of the Business Partner as per above evaluation.
Keywords
KBA , duplicated , business partner , delete , business partners , SRD-MD-BP , Business Partner , How To