Location is one of the most challenging data. This is why many countries created postal codes. That way, your mail will not get lost in delivery. In reality, many Asian countries are not using postal codes. Thus, the mismatch of rates to location for TMS often creates a lot of discrepancies. It is also one of key concerns for maintenance team as dirty location cannot be match to correct rates.
Find My Address
There is no standard way to name the address except to split to different fields like block, street, city or postal code. Small country like Singapore actually do not need a city field. New data form allows saving entire field naturally. You can also subscribe to map services to query by differing parameters like postal code or Lat/Lon. However, there is no standard return format and results varies among different maps providers.
Handling Location
If you are moving to digital transformation and data analytics, it is worth the investment to have some sanity to handle your location data. Commons techniques involves standardised usage of city or postal code. Usually, list of values (LOV) are used. Sometimes, you may face with refusal to clean up those data. If this is the case, you end up expending more cost and efforts go handle the chaotic data.
Location data is gaining importance for many applications especially TMS (Transportation Management System). However, it is a cat and mouse game to handle the different formats of location. Hopefully, as we move to smart data. All this can be automated and relieve the burden of users and application owners.
Danny Kwok 