Address Validation Module
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Revision as of 01:18, 21 October 2009
Contents |
Introduction
The new Address Validation Module (AVM) links CMS to Endicia's Dial-a-Zip server allowing users to validate individual addresses in real time. This option is available both in Order Entry and the Contact Manager (Customers) sections.
To use it, you'll simply click the new Validate button which is located by the address you want to validate. The validation response will indicate if your address could be validated and, if so, it will also be standardized.
If the address could not be validated, that means the address was not close enough to a deliverable address to be corrected and the customer should be contacted to confirm their address information.
What does the validation do?
The service performs address validation and standardization. In other words, it will validate that the address is deliverable (according to USPS,) a real address...not just one properly formatted. It will also standardize the address (like CASS) to append Zip +4, convert Street to St and so on. Here is a basic example:
Submit:
Return:
Ms. Joan Customer 247 HIGH ST PALO ALTO, CA 94301-1041
The example here is rather basic but the service can handle most anything you throw at it. It will automatically correct most common errors without input from the user. The service employs very sophisticated logic that looks at all aspects of the address (except name) to find the matching address.
- RDI - An added benefit to the validation process is it will return the the Residential Delivery Indicator. CMS will use this RDI to flag the address as commercial when appropriate. FedEx and UPS both assess a residential surcharge to their shipments and this flag will let CMS know when a shipment can go commercial, saving you the ~$2 residential surcharge. This flag will pass through to the UPS and FedEx through our shipping integrations automatically.
Performance
We expect to get a number of questions on how fast the validation responses will be. We cannot provide any definitive answers at this point but we're expecting around 1 second and have a number of reasons to be so optimistic:
- There is very little data being passed back and forth. This will minimize the communication time and the possibility of performance degradation you would experience even from a poor Internet connection.
- The CMS portion of the communication is near instant so we are not adding any noticeable overhead to the processing time.
- We are subscribing at their highest service level.
- Working through a custom third-party shipping solution which also uses Dial-a-Zip showed that address validation added ~1 second to label processing.
- When we asked Endicia about performance expectations, they stated that on a busy day they would expect users to see validation times around a quarter of a second.
Your results may vary of course and are subject to workstation resources (RAM and CPU) and available Internet bandwidthbut our tests thus far have been returning near immediate results. It is impressive.
Automation
While the Validate button is great for orders your operators are touching (either entering or imported orders they are verifying,) what can you do when importing orders automatically (using the Automated Imports Module) where an operator may not be reviewing the order?
To address this (pun intended) you'll now find a new address validation option available. When selected, it will automatically validate addresses in imported orders. If an address cannot be validated, the order will not be saved and will instead be available for manual review in the Verify Orders section...the same as any other validation exception (e.g. unrecognized product code, order not fully paid, back order, international, etc.)
Limitations
- A workstation must have Internet access to use the Address Validation Module. CMS is communicating directly from the workstation to the Dial-a-Zip web server.
- The AVM does not perform NCOA type move changes. In other words, it is not checking to see if that person lives at that address, only that the address is deliverable and standardized. NCOA type processing is only available by submitting data to Peachtree.
- The AVM only validates individual addresses. It is not used for batch address processing. We will be exploring batch processing options as a possible future enhancement to this module.
- AVM will only validate US addresses. The validate button will become disabled when the address is non-US.
- Results are returned in UPPER CASE. This only affects the address however and the name/company fields will remain untouched and in the case you had entered them.
Future considerations
- Batch processing
- Allow for the user to choose from a possible list of candidates when an exact match is not found.
- Support for updating the county
- Support for mixed case results
- Option to require validation before save
- Option to validate all addresses on an order at once
