Royal Mail AMU has so much more than PAF

Monday, 11th August 2014

Categories: Ideas

If AMU, PAF®, PIF™, Alias™ mean very little to you, your business could be missing out on some very useful information that other companies use to improve their business data, find new customers, and improve customer relations.

Royal Mail has a dedicated ring fenced business unit called the Address Management Unit to act as wholesalers of a wide range of addressing datasets.

The best known and most used is the Postcode Address File (PAF®)

PAF® is the UK’s best known address management database containing:

• 29.3 residential and business addresses
• 1.8m postcodes
• 1.4m business names
• 200,000 details of vacant properties

PAF® is the primary asset of the Address Management Unit which makes strenuous efforts to maintain and enhance the integrity of this fundamental database. It is constantly updated from daily feedback from 90,000 postmen and women, 63000 delivery walks validated, 250,000 new build details from Councils, responses to Royal Mail mailings, and even updates from businesses and the general public.

There are over 1.5m changes to PAF® each year, including changes to business names, new builds or derelict properties that need adding or deleting.

PAF® provides the basic information for mail sortation and delivery but the data is used by over 37,000 UK businesses for:

• Ordering goods online
• Online address look-ups
• Verifying customer details
• Satellite Navigation
• Digital Maps
• Database cleansing
• Goods distribution
• Accurate mail delivery

A third of PAF® users are organisations of less than 5 employees. Without PAF® they could not operate effectively and some of this bolt onto PAF® additional resources from the AMU to develop their businesses. These include:

• Postcode Information File (PIF) PIF creates barcodes from the address data held in the PAF® database. By using PIF to create a barcode companies can obtain better mailing rates, saving considerable sums if they mail large volumes
• Alias™ - is designed to work with data held in the PAF® database and contains over 2.5 m records of alternatives address details that have been used in the past, or established trading or business names. These additional records can be used to improve the integrity and performance of a company’s customer records
• Just Built™ is ideal for businesses who want to target new homeowners. These addresses have just been built and are capable of receiving mail for the first time
• Not Yet Built™ these are properties that are at the planning phase or under construction. Ideal for companies involved in construction, delivery of building products and utility companies
• Multiple Residence™ data includes details of the individuals behind individual addresses where there is more than one person or business at one address. The dataset contains records such as Flat A and Flat B that share a single letterbox, or perhaps Ground Floor Flat and Upper Floor Flat. Very important for deliveries, customer identification and fraud reduction

Mail and Print has access to the PAF™ database and is happy to talk through with clients all the options. Increasingly clients are recognising the value the data they hold and working to make sure it is as up to date as possible.

PAF® and the additional datasets like PIF™ and Alias™ can make a significant contribution to business development, profitability, and maintaining competitive advantage.

Mail and Print has considerable experience of taking the data clients have and making it work a lot harder - PAF® and all the associated additional datasets are an important resource which we use every day.  

Author: Gamze Bilgili