System Consolidation for a Single Source of Address Truth

What’s the true value of an address? If you are reading this, you likely already know the answer. The importance of having a correct address is essential for:

• shipping products and mailing invoices
• understanding the availability of a service
• ensuring data quality for a single view of your customer

More importantly, however, is the ability to establish a single source of the true address. After years of working with large enterprise clients, I’ve noticed a trend that has them using multiple software solutions and vendors to solve exactly the same problem: address validation, standardization, and correction.

Over many years, and potentially through multiple mergers and acquisitions, companies typically find they have multiple technologies to solve address quality issues. Customer-facing applications, such as order entry, will employ “type-ahead” address completion software. Enterprise applications for address management and validation will often use a batch process.

But there’s a problem. These tools are doing essentially the same operation and if the organization is using separate address validation solutions, these issues can arise:

• Different software solutions will provide different results
• Money is wasted paying for multiple tools doing the same operation
• The IT department is supporting multiple environments

Gartner estimates that 30% of software licenses are wasted and that does not include the cost of IT infrastructure and software maintenance. Then there are the hidden costs of having inconsistent data persisting throughout the organization, a nightmare for business analytics and marketing.

I have personally seen cases where a company’s online website was able to resolve a customer’s address, but in other internal systems the same address was missing. As you can imagine, it led to a very frustrated customer.

Now we get to the fun part. How do we, at Korem, help our customers solve this problem?

1. We provide a comprehensive Geospatial Health Check

It starts with a Health Check of the business’ solutions for customer database management and understanding where address validation and standardization are employed in corporate CRM or ERP systems, for example. The Health Check involves a deep dive with all the relevant lines of business to determine the status quo of the organization’s address management tools and how addresses are consumed by the different areas of the business.

2. We look for Optimization

We then look at which tools are performing those same tasks within different departments. This might seem like a simple exercise, but in large organizations it can be quite difficult and involve many stakeholders.

3. We advise you on the right solution

With so many solutions on the market, choosing the right solution to handle all your internal use cases can be complex if you are unfamiliar with all the possibilities. We help our clients not only choose the one with the right technology (cloud vs on-premise, small geography vs global, batch vs real time, etc.) but also one that provides the best results in the areas where they perform the most business.

4. Moving day!

Finally, the last step is to use an agile methodology to efficiently move existing applications to the new platform. This includes everything from requirement gathering to integration to testing.

This can be the most time-consuming step depending on the number of applications currently using an address validation solution. Many times, the requirements of each application are different and require fine-tuning the new solution to meet the needs of the business.

Benefits of a Single Source of Truth

Once this exercise is complete, the benefits to your organization are plentiful.  Here are some examples:

• Reduced costs of software and IT infrastructure
• Standardized and single address across all platforms
• More accurate single view of your customer
• Better customer experience by having your entire organization speaking the same (address) language.

As you can see, this exercise of consolidation can be a challenging endeavor and requires a careful plan to execute correctly.

So what’s left to do? Step one… admit you have a problem. Step two…Contact Korem today.