Addresss Standardization and WAVES

[sigma]

Hi All

We have a need to potentially standardize names and addresses. We have daily flat files of data coming from web feeds and needs to be matched against CRM data for duplicate contacts or customers or prospect customers.

As I see it without WAVES..
If we do standardize addresses then the flow will have to seperate the data specific to countries and run standardization of these country records against their correspnding rulesets for address and then finally call the unduplicate job that could see the same matching criteria
In short we have to design a flow to invoke jobs that do county specific standardization.

We do not have WAVES database, but as a question, if we had WAVES database how willmy above logic be different?

With WAVES database, will our input file with multiple countries generate one standardized output that has
standardized addrresdata or will I have to split the file for each country and pass it to WAVES for each of those countries

Basically without WAVES I see multiple jobs for standardization as many as there are countries.
We can start with 10 most used as per our db but if a new country comes along then one has to define a set of jobs and rulesets

Any other ideas?

Just wanting to understand better how the WAVES stages would work if we had the database

[rjdickson]

Hi,

With WAVES (or its successor AVI [Address Verification Interface]), you would feed all countries into the AVI stage and identify the column that contains the country (code or name). AVI then, behind the scenes, splits and processes the data per country/postal standards. The output is a single schema with all country data. You do not need to create separate jobs for each country.

By the way, AVI is an additional cost - please see your IBM representative for pricing information.

I hope this helps!

[sigma]

Thanks for the reply.

What we are after is address standardization only. Not postal code verification.

In that case, just curious if we can just use MNS stage.

Just curious what are some of the pain points of using MNS stage

In searching through I did not get a lot of hits on MNS stage so just curious if it is really used by folks

I tried using it but it gives errors and I have created a support ticket for IBM but just cuirious on the feedback of its usage for address standardization

[ray.wurlod]

MNS (multi-national (address) standardization) is what you need. The main pain point is that it does not always standardize to street-level addresses (and, indeed, not all countries have these). But it's pretty good to city/town level.

[rjdickson]

Appologies for the confusion. I mentioned AVI because of the WAVES reference.

Agreed - MNS is the way to go. It covers the major countries (you can see them in the GUI), so the pain may be you have a country it does not cover.

Good luck!