Optimising address data to drive efficiency

As utilities move closer towards digitising their services, the need for high quality interconnected data is greatly increased. The supply, maintenance and billing are all centred on address data, so accuracy here is pivotal in linking the different datasets in the drive for efficiency and increased revenue.

With address data as the central focus, utilities need to consider:

1) The accuracy of their address data

2) The unique address anchor that can be used to verify and link addresses from any system or department.

With the millions of address changes recorded by GeoPlace every six weeks, it’s critical to maintain accuracy once you have it. After all, out of date addresses are going to result in incorrect billing, leading to unpaid bills, problems switching supplier and therefore incurring compensation costs and the inability to reconcile different systems.

The first step towards tackling this is to match and cleanse your address data against a data source that uses the British Standard BS7666. Ordnance Survey’s AddressBase Premium (ABP) dataset gives you:

• The Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) – the anchor for your addresses.

• The geo coordinates of an address giving you pinpoint precision.

• Local aliases.

• The full life cycle of a property from build to demolition including any address changes.

ABP is continually updated, and due to its richness is increasingly being adopted as the standard across both the public and private sectors.

By matching against the adopted address standard in ABP, you’ll identify which addresses are good and which need cleansing. You can then store the UPRNs against the addresses in your legacy system, providing the anchor to verify addresses, and link them to different systems.

Once your data is cleansed you’ll want to keep it that way. By utilising an address data management solution you can automate the six-weekly updates from ABP and keep the cleansed addresses held in your systems up to date automatically.

Finally, you’ll want to ensure the recording of an address within a business transaction is accurate, eg an invoice request or a supplier switch. By using an address lookup tool, it will draw the address from your master address source that’s now kept up to date and held in the British Standard BS7666.

Optimising your address data, and using the UPRN as the anchor to link systems is key to maximising efficiency. At Aligned Assets, we have more than 25 years’ experience delivering cutting-edge address data solutions ranging from high speed matching and cleansing, to sub-second predictive searching, as well as solutions for managing and sharing address data with any team or operational system.

To get your address data up to speed, drop us a line to schedule a demo.

Visit: aligned-assets.co.uk/tech-talk-utilities