Imperial Civil Enforcement Solutions Limited, a long-standing AFD customer, is the UK’s largest and most experienced provider of parking, environmental, and traffic management systems. For 28 years, they have partnered with AFD to deliver fast and accurate address validation, integrated within their systems used by end users and for their own business processes.
One of their systems that was not utilizing AFD’s data validation solutions assists councils in assigning addresses to parking permits. Local authorities manage parking permit eligibility based on addresses within a defined area. When address data is incorrect during the setup of these areas, resident applications become unsuccessful, leading to wasted time in finding, confirming, and fixing the errors.
We sat down with William Jervis, Product Manager, and Harry Adamson, Senior Software Developer, to learn how the introduction of one of AFD’s solutions into another of their processes last year is now helping to ensure greater address data accuracy and eliminate potential frustration and waste.
William begins: “When we were onboarding clients, we would match data based on the address, but inconsistencies and variations in the data we received made it difficult to ensure that every eligible property was included.”
“Very similar addresses can appear multiple times in the same city. For example, ‘St. John’s Street’ might be formatted in various ways, such as ‘St. John Street’, ‘Saint Johns Street’, or even ‘St Johns St.’ These inconsistencies required us to apply what’s known as fuzzy matching techniques, which became increasingly difficult and unsatisfactory when handling databases containing millions of addresses.”
“If only 1% of addresses failed to match, that’s tens of thousands—which we could not check manually due to the time and cost involved. After the council’s system went live, new issues could emerge that required further manual tweaks and fixes. This put a significant burden on both our teams and the council, leading to additional work for everyone involved.”
Needing a solution to improve the matching process, Imperial turned to AFD’s address lookup solution, combined with Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) data.
As its name suggests, the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) is a unique and authoritative reference code for every addressable location, converting it into a consistently formatted address.
Harry continues: “AFD’s solution takes a UPRN and returns the valid address record, making it much easier for our technical consultants to set up and configure the system and confirm that all eligible properties are accurately included.”
Not only has the setup process become more streamlined, but ongoing data maintenance has also improved. “If we need to add or remove addresses, we can do so quickly and accurately using the UPRN, knowing we aren’t creating or just removing duplicates, which means we don’t need to review the entire database.”
William, summarizing the experience with AFD and their solutions, says: “Working with AFD has been great. The team has been helpful, always responsive, and highly knowledgeable about address data solutions. Prompt email replies make a huge difference, allowing us to resolve any issues quickly and efficiently. Following AFD’s advice to use their address validation solution with UPRN added has been a game-changer for us and has solved many of the problems we previously faced, saving us and our customers time, effort, and resources.”
We would highly recommend the experts at AFD to any organisation dealing with complex address databases and matching requirements.
Could your address data processes be improved by the addition of UPRN? The Postcode People at AFD have been helping organisations get data right for over 40 years. Call 0333 433 0711 or email joel.miller@afd.co.uk to discuss your requirements with a data quality expert.
We serve thousands of organisations and a network of hundreds of partners across multiple industry sectors, enabling them to have full confidence in their contact data.