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WHITE PAPER
ADDRESS MANAGEMENT
Adopting AddressBase Premium in the energy sector
FEBRUARY 2016
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Section Page no
1 Introduction 3
2 Why do organisations need to manage addresses? 3
3 Why AddressBase Premium? 3
4 Adopting AddressBase Premium 4 4.1 Understand the As Is 5 4.2 Establish the goals for address management 5 4.3 Select an address verification method 5 4.4 Decide how to store the master records 5 4.5 Enforce address verification at all capture and maintenance trigger points 5 4.6 Cleanse the existing back-book 5 4.7 Pre-define actions for address changes 6
5 Benefits of adoption 6 5.1 Improved efficiency in managing addresses 6 5.2 Improved asset management 6 5.3 Improved customer service 6 5.4 Improved logistics efficiency 6 5.5 Improved new customer acquisition 6 5.6 Improved integration of third party data 6 5.7 Location analytics 7
6 Your next move 7
Responsibility for this documentRichard Crump, Managing Consultant, OS Consulting and Technical Services
Change historyVersion Date Summary of change1.0 November 2015 First issue
TrademarksOrdnance Survey and the OS Symbol are registered trademarks of Ordnance Survey, Britain’s mapping agency.
The AddressBase products are created by GeoPlace by combining local authority data with other national datasets. GeoPlace is a limited liability partnership between the Local Government Association and Ordnance Survey.
Table of contents
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1 Introduction
AddressBase® Premium from Ordnance Survey is the most current, comprehensive and accurate dataset of addresses in Great Britain. It is widely used across central and local government as the de-facto register of addresses and supports seamless data sharing between teams, departments and tiers of government.
AddressBase Premium is an enabler of better address management; helping to streamline operations, reduce errors and waste and uncover new business opportunities.
This briefing document has been created to help energy suppliers who are considering adopting AddressBase Premium. It will inform stakeholders on why better address management is important, why AddressBase Premium should be considered and how other organisations implement it. Finally, it summarises the key benefits of adopting AddressBase Premium and provides guidance on what to do next.
2 Why do organisations need to manage addresses?
For many organisations choosing to adopt AddressBase Premium, one of the key drivers is a desire to improve their management of addresses.
We all use addresses to refer to places; typically these are properties that people live in or work at. The commonly accepted structure has its origins in the postal system and delivery of mail. In this regard, addresses are extremely effective. They are easy for people to communicate and remember. But crucially, addresses are a poor way of storing and managing locations in a machine environment. Consider the following ways in which an address can be written:
• Flat 1, 4 Acacia Avenue, Southbourne, Bournemouth, BH1 1ZZ
• 1, Burlington Mansions, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH1 1ZZ• Ground Floor Flat, 4 Acacia Avenue, Bournemouth, BH1 1ZZ• The Lodge, Burlington Mansions, Bournemouth, BH1 1ZZ
All of these variations refer to a single (fictional) apartment. It is not uncommon to see addresses written in many different ways according to the taste of the occupier. All of the above examples are legitimate in the sense that they will all facilitate the delivery of mail or services to the property.
However, business systems can have great difficulty recognising that these different addresses refer to the same property. Because addresses are strings of text, there is also the possibility of spelling and typing errors being introduced.
Large organisations will have multiple contact points with customers and so may gather the same address multiple times. They obtain addresses from other sources (such as third party
suppliers or through mergers and acquisitions)and addresses are constantly changing as properties are sub-divided, demolished, replaced or built afresh. In the August 2015 update to AddressBase Plus, the OS address product, over 67,000 addresses were added, more than 23,000 were deleted and just over two million were updated over a six week period.
The difficulty of managing addresses can lead organisations to experience many problems including:
• Address records stored in multiple databases – each database holding its own master copy of the address.
• Duplicate records held for the same property – often with slight variations in format.
• Invalid or dummy addresses – entered by customers or employees to bypass business processes.
• Complicated data management processes – daily effort spent by the organisation to reconcile address records across the multiple systems.
• No single view of the customer, household or business.
Ultimately, poor address data management can lead to inefficiencies, missed opportunities and impact upon customer service.
3 Why AddressBase Premium?
AddressBase Premium is the most current, comprehensive and accurate dataset available of addresses, properties and land areas where services are provided. It is created as a joint collaboration between Ordnance Survey and the Local Government Association and includes over 39 million addresses, all of which are allocated a Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN).
The UPRN is the definitive unique identifier for every address in Great Britain. It provides a complete, consistent identifier throughout a property’s life cycle – from planning permission, through construction, occupation and change of use to demolition and beyond.
AddressBase Premium contains 10 million more addresses when compared with Royal Mail’s address product, Postal Address File (PAF). The additional records consist of:
• Multiple occupancy addresses – AddressBase Premium creates unique address records for every unit within a multiple occupancy property. PAF by comparison will only record the delivery point address, which may be a single letter box serving multiple flats behind. Many public and private sector organisations rely on this granularity to deliver services to individual dwellings within apartment blocks.
• Provisional addresses – AddressBase Premium contains over 400,000 provisional addresses created by Local Authorities. These are addresses where planning consent has been granted and construction is underway or due
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to start. All provisional addresses are given a UPRN that will stay with the property after it is built and occupied. Provisional records represent a valuable source of change intelligence and help organisations to acquire new customers and forecast future demand for services in a particular location. Ordnance Survey itself uses the provisional address to plan and schedule its surveying activities.
• Historic addresses – These are addresses that are no longer in use because they no longer exist. This information can allow for analysis into a site and what existed there in the past. It also helps organisations to ensure they can always match their customer records to a valid address.
• Alternative addresses – Alternative addresses can ensure you do not have duplicate records in your database by recognising that a home owner refers to their property differently to the record contained in your database. For example, Rose Cottage rather than 10 Arcadia Avenue.
• Objects Without Postal Addresses (OWPAs) – OWPAs are address records of places where people don’t live. Examples include churches, garages and libraries and assets such as electricity substations. Many public and private sector organisations successfully deliver services to these locations thanks to the OWPA records in AddressBase Premium.
All addresses in AddressBase Premium are given an accurate location on-the-ground. This is known as the geocode. It is usually centred in the middle of the main building associated with the address.
Addresses are also given a detailed classification according to the type of use. There are 563 different address classifications within AddressBase Premium, arranged in a hierarchy. For example, a Youth Hostel is classified as CH01YH and uses all four levels of hierarchy:
Primary code Primary description
C Commercial
Secondary code Secondary description
H Hotel/motelBoarding/guest house
Tertiary code Tertiary description
01 Boarding/guest houseBed and breakfast/youth hostel
Quaternary code Quaternary description
CH01YH Youth Hostel
Sheltered accommodation is classified as RD08 and uses three levels of hierarchy:
Primary code Primary description
R Residential
Secondary code Secondary description
D Dwelling
Tertiary code Tertiary description
08 Sheltered accommodation
Figure 1: AddressBase Premium overlaid over OS MasterMap Topography
4 Adopting AddressBase Premium
The steps required and costs associated with adopting AddressBase Premium will vary from customer to customer. It is dependent upon the current state of the addressing data within the organisation, how widespread address data is embedded into operational processes, the existence of any current address management capability and finally the To-Be address management strategy.
Many organisations find it useful to take a Master Data Management (MDM) approach to addressing to maximise the benefits. MDM refers to everything an organisation does to manage the critical data of the organisation, the goal being to provide a single version of the truth. For addressing, this means creating a single golden address record that can be easily shared and referenced throughout the organisation. To succeed with an address MDM approach, the following must be considered:
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4.1 Understanding the As Is
This is a short piece of discovery work to reveal and document how well addresses are managed within the organisation. The key steps are:
1. Identify all address data-stores in the organisation.2. For each address data-store, understand the trigger points
for addresses being captured, updated and removed.3. Assess the quality of the addresses stored in each data-
store.4. Identify the level of address duplication.
Ordnance Survey regularly performs address quality assessments for its customers on a consultancy basis. A recent project for a customer in the Energy and Infrastructure market sampled and analysed over three million addresses from multiple databases. This allowed the customer to measure the quality of its current addresses and plan appropriately for a full scale implementation project.
4.2 Establish the goals for address management
It is important to establish early what the organisation wants to achieve from the address data. Better address data management may lead to efficiencies and improved customer service and a more analytical use of the address data may open up new opportunities. It is good practice to understand the ‘art of the possible’ with the data and marry this to organisational goals. OS can help organisations with this step through its consulting services team facilitating workshops, interviews and providing product expertise.
4.3 Select an address verification method
Address verification is the process of checking a user defined address against the master list in AddressBase Premium. The goal is to make a match between the two. This is best achieved at the point of address capture, which may be a web-form used by a customer or a CRM screen used by a call centre agent. A question that all AddressBase Premium customers have to ask is how they will implement the dataset into their operations.
Customers can take the data themselves and create address verification solutions around it; however it is more common to see AddressBase Premium used as part of a Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software product or Application Programming Interface (API). The market for address verification software is served by many competing products and services from Ordnance Survey directly and its reseller network. The merits of different solutions must be weighed up against the goals for the project.
4.4 Decide how to store the master records
It is necessary to consider whether a single master database of addresses is established or whether addresses are federated across multiple databases. An MDM strategy might suggest
the former is best: however either approach can be valid, so long as the UPRN becomes the means by which addresses are matched and shared between business systems.
If addresses are federated, it is important to ensure that an update to an existing address in one system (such as a change of property name) is reflected in other databases needing to hold the same address.
4.5 Enforce address verification at all capture and maintenance trigger points
The next focus should be on preventing the current situation getting any worse. Addresses will enter the organisation at defined points in the business process such as new customer on-boarding. They also change at defined points, for example, when a customer moves house. All of these trigger-points risk introducing more bad addresses. Bad or invalid addresses arise for many reasons, some benign such as typing errors, some malign such as fraud attempts. So it is essential that only clean and valid addresses are put into databases. This is done by enforcing address verification at each trigger point.
4.6 Cleanse the existing back-book
The next step is to fix the back-book of addresses; all of the existing addresses in the databases should be put through a process of cleansing and matching. The goal is to make a high confidence match to AddressBase Premium and update the database(s) with the clean address record and UPRN.
This process starts with batching together the address data in the source systems and using address matching algorithms to cycle through the data and match to AddressBase Premium. The level of matching achieved is dependent upon the quality of the source addresses and the ability of the algorithms. Some organisations create their own address matching algorithms: however it is more common to use a COTS software package or address matching API that is already integrated with AddressBase Premium. Ordnance Survey can advise customers on the range of market options.
As a rule of thumb, a 90% match rate for residential addresses and an 80% match rate for commercial addresses is considered good.
A key question is what to do with the addresses that don’t match. The answer is dependent upon how much value the organisation places on having a matched address. If it is a database for direct marketing, it might be acceptable to discard the non-matches. If the organisation delivers critical services to the address, the non matches need investigating further. This can be done using a combination of manual desktop analysis and, if necessary, field inspection. Ordnance Survey can perform the entire cleansing process service for its customers on a consultancy basis.
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4.7 Pre-define actions for address changes
Customer addresses are going to change. Properties are demolished and replaced, postcodes are changed and buildings are given new names. Organisations may get to know about this when their customers inform them. But sometimes they won’t. This is where ‘change intelligence’ comes in. AddressBase Premium is released on a six week cycle. Customers can opt to receive a full copy each time or receive a Change Only Update (COU). The COU can be used to cross reference against an organisation’s existing addresses. By pre-defining the actions to take for different types of change, it makes it possible to proactively trigger the right workflow response as early as possible.
5 Benefits of adoption
The benefits of adopting AddressBase Premium will vary by customer and industry. For the energy sector, the potential benefits are wide-ranging and include industry specific challenges such as the smart meter rollout.
5.1 Improved efficiency in managing addresses
Implementing AddressBase Premium and using an MDM approach to addresses can lead to efficiencies in how addresses are stored, managed and shared both inside the organisation and within the wider ecosystem of suppliers/partners/regulators.
The level of efficiency depends upon the level of intervention required to maintain the current position and the present investment in systems, software and effort. Organisations should ask themselves these questions:
• How many addresses do we hold? • How many are duplicate addresses?• How many databases store addresses? • Are the different address stores reconciled, and how? • What manpower is expended in keeping these up to date?• What errors does this introduce into my business processes?
Figure 2: AddressBase Premium overlaid on OS MasterMap Topography
5.2 Improved asset management
Organisations which maintain or track assets at individual properties can expect to improve the management of these by having a definitive URPN for every address (including every unit at a multiple occupancy property) and by associating their own asset identifier to the UPRN.
Figure 2 shows the association of meter point referencing against the UPRN. This simple approach helps maintain a link between meter references (MPAN/MPRN), existing customer information, addressing and the exact location of the address.
5.3 Improved customer service
The impact of sub-optimal addressing on customer service should be reviewed. For instance, are all interactions with an address easily drawn together? Is there a single customer view? Are inappropriate marketing offers generated because different departments do not know of their respective interactions?
5.4 Improved logistics efficiency
The accurate geocode within AddressBase Premium helps organisations to streamline their logistics by identifying the exact location of their customers. It is easy to underestimate the difficulty in locating addresses in Great Britain. Many addresses can be easily located with a postcode and a house number, but equally many cannot and present a significant real-world challenge in finding them. More than 18% of residential addresses use a name instead of a number and 20% of postcodes cover an area greater than 18 football pitches1. Organisations that need to deliver services to the door or send field engineers can optimise scheduling and increase the likelihood of locating difficult-to-find properties by using the precise geocode in AddressBase Premium.
5.5 Improved new customer acquisition
This can be achieved by exploiting the provisional addresses in AddressBase Premium to target new properties being built. In addition, if an organisation cross references their customer addresses against the total set of addresses in AddressBase Premium, it is easy to generate a list of non-customer address list for direct marketing. These can be filtered by geography and classification for more targeted marketing.
5.6 Improved integration of third party data
The UPRN has become the standard method of sharing addresses within local and central government and is rapidly gaining adoption in the private sector. This has led Ordnance Survey to release the UPRN as open-data to increase its adoption in other data sets. A number of third party suppliers of enhanced property data (for example, construction age and materials) have created datasets that are already matched to the UPRN. This makes for seamless integration of external datasets into the organisation’s own address infrastructure.
1 Source: Ordnance Survey analysis of AddressBase Premium and CodePoint with Polygons, Jan 2014
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This additional data can be used to better segment properties for targeted initiatives such as ECO.
5.7 Location analytics
This describes the process of analysing geospatial data to reveal trends or patterns and predict future behaviour.
Typically this involves bringing together address data with building attribute data (size, height, distance from the curb and so on) and customer data to build predictive models.
This is a strong growth area that Ordnance Survey sees its customers investing in and it has potential to drive benefits for energy companies, particularly in support of smart meter rollout. Many of the challenges around the rollout can be met by smarter analysis of the data. Starting with a clean list of rollout addresses (already matched to AddressBase Premium), properties can be categorised into buckets according to how easy or difficult the installation is likely to be. Drawing upon existing installation experience, known technology limitations and property data from Ordnance Survey and third parties, it is possible to create models that can predict the difficulty in rolling out smart meters to each address on the rollout list.
◀――――▶
Length of longest side Number of flats
Residential/commercial Circularity measure
Figure 3: Example attributes that can be built into a difficulty to install model
6 Your next move
Building a business case for adopting AddressBase Premium in a large organisation can require agreement from multiple departments and stakeholders on the likely return on investment. Ordnance Survey can help by providing access to experienced consultants to lead or support a discovery phase consulting work package. This is configurable to each customer’s needs. However, a typical starting point would be:
Workshop 1: Scope setting
• Discussion of your business objectives and challenges and how this relates to location data.
• Overview of the features and benefits of the AddressBase Premium product.
• Agreement on the areas for further investigation to generate the ROI.
• Agreement on scope of (optional) Proof of Concept to analyse the current address data.
(Optional) Proof of Concept
• For a defined geographic area, the customer will share all of their address records with Ordnance Survey. Note; we have extensive data handling procedures in place for dealing with our customers’ data. Furthermore, we do not handle any personally identifiable data.
• Ordnance Survey conducts analysis of the addresses supplied – for example, percentage of addresses matched to AddressBase Premium, split by classification. We can also provide additional metrics if requested such as market penetration within the defined geography compared.
• Quality statements against the data.
These initial steps are followed with further workshops or one-to-one interviews as required to generate an outline business case and plan for adopting AddressBase Premium.
So why wait? Contact Ordnance Survey today and ask to speak to one of our addressing experts about how AddressBase Premium can benefit your organisation.
