Having looked at why using an Address Validation service for your customer database is vitally important for effective business in our last blog post, this month we take a deeper, more technical dive into Intech’s solution to help you understand how it all works together to deliver the service known as location intelligence, and the benefits of the solution.
As the name suggests, location intelligence is just that – technology trained to be smart by utilising the fast-calculating capability of modern software systems to reliably deliver information about the locations of people and places for the purpose of communication, marketing and commerce.
To borrow a metaphor, location intelligence is about finding the needle in a haystack so you can then sell the needle!
Understanding the address validation solution
If you’re already familiar with Intech’s complete solution for information quality – known as IQ Office® – you’ll know that its purpose is to resolve information quality issues for businesses that deal with complex and high volumes of data, often across multiple platforms. It’s also available with native support for different platforms, including Windows, Unix/Linux ,AWS and AZUR.
The various integrated components of IQ Office enable it to validate addresses by going through a series of processes:
- Data parsing and standardisation – which is about transforming an address text file or string into the components of an address and bring it to a standard structure , so to speak.
- Record matching and de-duplication – which is about getting to a single point of truth or best qualified match for each record (read more about that in another recent blog)
The two components in IQ Office that carry out these processes to enable address validation are known as IQ Standardiser and IQ Rapid Address. Together, they provide the key to location intelligence.
IQ Standardiser and IQ Rapid Address
The first component, IQ Standardiser, is the high-performance engine that transforms data by parsing, validating and standardising data of any type into a structure that complies to an external industry reference, such as AS, NZS, ISO, or your own particular organisational or industry standard.
It utilises soft-coded logic files – called ‘Grammar’ files – that define the transformation process to produce a unique dataset, with assistance from an Address Reference File (ARF).
Some key examples of ARFs are managed by organisations that will be familiar to the person on the street, such as Australia Post’s Postal Address File (PAF), or New Zealand Post’s Postal Address File (PAF).
Others may be less familiar, but just as important as they rely on geospatial data, such as the Critchlow National Address Register (CNAR) for NZ addresses or the PSMA’s Geo-coded National Address File (GNAF).
Once the IQ Standardiser has done its job, it then hands over to the other component to complete the address validation process, the IQ Rapid Address engine.
IQ Rapid Address is a deterministic address-matching engine that intelligently matches address data to one of the ARFs we looked at above.
Put more simply, what the IQ Rapid Address component does – in super-fast time, by the way – is hold up your data against the data in these meticulously maintained and trustworthy address reference files to see if it finds a match.
As well as providing address validation, IQ Rapid Address can provide powerful and accurate geographic coding (or geo-coding) capabilities, but that’s a topic for another blog. What is most important for a business is the benefits of the solution.
The benefits of location intelligence
For any business or organisation that relies on databases to communicate or sell, having a tool that delivers location intelligence like this is like having a meticulous detective on your staff team who works fast and doesn’t need to rest.
With the technical components in IQ Office handling the complex processes of address geocoding in real time, your business can then benefit from the location intelligence it provides.
Consider these factors for using IQ Office:
- There are zero training requirements for staff in your business. IQ Office is user-friendly and can handle everything, allowing you to utilise the results for delivering better business to your now identified customers.
- Intech provides support for any of the Address Reference Files (ARFs) mentioned above.
- By using as few as eight characters entered in their ‘natural order’ in your database, IQ Office can return a complete validated and geocoded address automatically.
- Address lookups take place at extremely high speeds, potentially up to thousands of records per second, meaning you save time – and time is money
- For those times when an address can’t be validated, IQ Office provides detailed error messages and will still return a geo location whereby a geographic code is returned based on logic as opposed to a direct and unique link of the address to the code in the reference data.
- Our extensive track record in providing address validation solutions attests to their reliability and accuracy.
Why not get in touch with Intech Solutions today for a confidential discussion on how the IQ Office solution can deliver your business all these benefits of location intelligence, and more.
Intech provides data solutions that lay a secure foundation for robust, cost-effective and timely business transformation. Intech’s products have been successfully deployed to thousands of users, across hundreds of sites. See intechsolutions.com.au