The first step in data management and data governance  
Customer and Vendor data standardization is an important first step in any Master Data Management and Data Governance initiative because many different areas (Marketing, Customer Service, Sales, Credit, Accounts Receivable, Procurement, Accounts Payable, and Shipping) in the organization rely on the accuracy of this information in every business activity.

Business risks result from bad customer/vendor data 

Embarassing mistakes, higher costs and fraud are some of the risks that companies take on when customer and vendor data are not in control.  Some of the common issues companies face are:

 

   Customer and vendor names and addresses are often out of date and do
   not meet USPS standards (for households and zip+4 compatibility), and they
   are often duplicated because similar customer and vendor names and
   addresses are spelled slightly different in the ERP database and in other
   databases too.

   Invalid customer and vendor names and addresses
   Can the staff be certain that the customer or vendor actually exist at all? Do 
   your procedures include validating name and address data to eliminate the
   possibility of fraud?

   As important as having correct customer and vendor information is, no one
   has time to check the accuracy of the thousands of database records because
   this requires a great deal of manual effort.

  Customer and vendor data cleansing performed quickly and efficiently
  GL Associates helps companies to standardize and cleanse their customer   
  and vendor address information with up-to-date USPS standards, validate    
  household information, and to de-duplicate customers and vendors in a single
  database, or across all databases in the entire organization. We do it quickly
  and efficiently because we are noted experts in this area, and we have
  standardized, cleansed and de-duplicated hundreds of millions of customer
  and vendor addresses.

  GL Associates offers a complete end-to-end services  using a two-step
  approach  
  
  Step 1: Address cleansing and standardization

  In the first step of the GL Associates cleansing and standardization process,   
  all name and address data is standardized based on USPS rules. Street  
  names, street directionals and zip-codes are all corrected based on the latest
  USPS data. This will give the system a set of addresses with all misspellings
  and changed zip-codes or street names corrected.

  Step 2: Customer/Vendor de-duplication
  The next step of the process is a name and address match between the
  cleansed records. This will identify the duplicates based on name and
  address.  The matching is based on industry-standard best-of-breed
  matching that can account for nicknames, spelling errors, different titles and 
  even fraudulent addresses. Once the number of duplicates is ascertained,
  GLA can propose a strategy to merge the address data and purge the
  duplicates while moving all the history to the remaining record. The resulting 
  file contains one record for each unique name and address, and these
  records will have the most up-to-date address information based on USPS
  rules.