Davis Turner

"The most important benefit Capscan gives us is confidence that our customer database is now populated with accurate pickup and delivery addresses, effectively reducing and often removing wasted transport journeys. This saves us the unnecessary cost and ensures we give a professional service every time,"

Business and IT Solutions Manager at Davies Turner, Julie Hollis

The Right Person, the Right Place

Having a corporate customer database with accurate address data is crucial when you're in the business of getting something to the right person at the right place. A mistyped or incorrect address could easily result in a wasted journey, incurring costs that cannot be recuperated from the customer, and reflecting an unsatisfactory image. For the UK's largest independent freight forwarding and logistics group, Davies Turner, avoiding such unnecessary costs is a fundamental business requirement.

Davies Turner's supply chain management operations include international freight (exporting and importing), transport, logistics and warehousing services, each bringing in new customers whose details need to be captured and stored in the company's database. New customers relating to all areas of the business are generated through telesales, via the Davies Turner website, from sales representatives or routed through overseas partners.

"In the past when we captured new customers' details over the telephone, from sales reps or over the web, we had no address verification process and would be at risk from mistyped information or incorrect addresses," explains Business and IT Solutions Manager at Davies Turner, Julie Hollis. "This would sometimes result in wasted journeys for our drivers or wrongly delivered freight which risked a bad reflection on us and possibly losing that customer. These are costs we couldn't claim from our customer and we felt could be avoided."

"We also felt the whole data capture process could be sped up significantly, reducing keystrokes for our data capture team as well as errors which would only need to be corrected later on. One important concern for us was for any new software to interact seamlessly with our IBM iSeries server, at an affordable cost," adds Hollis.

A Comprehensive Business Addressing Solution

Davies Turner selected Capscan's business address management software Matchcode Commercial, for use by every user working on its system to capture the address data of each new customer. 570 users are spread across 24 branches of the different divisions of the company including Davies Turner & Co, Davies Turner Aircargo, Davies Turner Worldwide Movers and Davies Turner Ireland. "We chose Matchcode Commercial because it was within budget, supported our server and its business address database enabled us to quickly access our corporate customers' details, including telephone numbers at the point of data capture."

Customer details taken from the telephone, web or sales representatives are entered into the system by a user, which is immediately validated by Matchcode Commercial through a postcode lookup process. The Matchcode Commercial database consists of over 2.2 million trading organisations, ranging from small businesses and shops through to blue-chip corporations and local government agencies. The database is designed to work alongside the standard PAF data or to be used independently as a stand-alone database.

Matchcode Commercial allows a user to enter a postcode or partial address and it returns a full and valid address including the organisation name. Matchcode Commercial also provides Standard Industry Codes (SIC Codes) and telephone numbers where available. Used in Batch mode, the commercial database can help to improve automatic matching rates where there is a high incidence of business addresses.

"The implementation was carried out on time and a real pleasure," says Hollis. "The software fully supports our iSeries."

"In addition to the postcode lookup, we have given the users an option to do an open single field search, where they can search by any part of the address including company name, street name, town name, postal area or a combination of these. Matchcode Commercial will match this data to a valid address," adds Hollis.

Saved Time, Cost And Wasted Journeys

The speed of the data capture process has noticeably improved for Davies Turner, where previously address details for its corporate customers would have had to be entered manually. Typically, typing a seven-letter postcode will now pull up a full address for the customer, including the company name and telephone number taken from the Commercial database. "We have reduced the number of keystrokes it takes to enter a valid address significantly," says Hollis.

"The most important benefit Capscan gives us is confidence that our customer database is now populated with accurate pickup and delivery addresses, effectively reducing and often removing wasted transport journeys. This saves us the unnecessary cost and ensures we give a professional service every time," concludes Hollis.