Postal Processing for Client Databases

February 24, 2005 2:25 PM

I have a client database with about 200K records in it. Addresses were fed in by a variety of people so there're tons of typos/missing information and not much in the way of standardization. I need to do some postal processing (CASS, DSF2, LACS and NCOA) on the file. Is that something that's mostly done in software and so could be done in-house, or does it require a lot of specialized human intervention and so something that it makes more sense to outsource? If it can be done in-house, where would I look for software to do it? If it should be outsourced, what should I expect to pay for a file with 200K records?
posted by willnot to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

I'm not sure how you'd do it in house. I'd definitely outsource it. And I'd outsource it to whoever is going to be doing your mailing ... one of the big houses like Donnelley or Mailright will should do all of the processing for you and roll the cost of the processing into the cost of the mailing contract.
posted by SpecialK at 5:49 PM on February 24, 2005

You might want to look at address verification software to standardize your database records. One product I've used is CODE-1 Plus that accepts a user entered address, and returns a validated and standardized version. There's some coding required to communicate with their web service, but the developer I worked with got it up and running pretty quick.

Depending on the types of errors in your database, some of the addresses may return more than one potential match upon validation, so you will need someone to review that. Hopefully the number of addresses requiring human review will be far less than 200K, which might make the job manageable in-house.
posted by hoppytoad at 8:31 PM on February 24, 2005