Liliendahl on Data Quality

When doing data quality improvement in business-to-business party master data an often used shortcut is matching your portfolio of business customers with a business directory and preferably picking new customers from the directory in the future.

If you are doing business in more than one country you will have some considerations about what business directory to use like engaging with a local business directory for each country or engaging with a single business directory covering all countries in question.

There are pro’s and con’s.

One subject is conformity. I have met this issue a couple of times. A business directory covering many countries will have a standardized way of formatting the different elements like a postal address, whereas a local (national) business directory will use best practice for the particular country.

An example from my home country Denmark:

The Dun & Bradstreet WorldBase is a business directory holding 170 million business entities from all over the world. A Danish street address is formatted like this:

Observe that Denmark belongs to that half of the earth where house numbers are written after the street name.

In a local business directory (based on the public registry) you will be able to get this format:

Street name = Hovedgaden

Here you get an atomized address with metadata for the atomized elements and the unique address coding used in Denmark.