Case Studies
Tribal
Who is Tribal?
Tribal aims to be the first choice for creative IT and information management solutions that improve and transform organisations. They deliver complete business solutions, incorporating both technology and support services to the public and private sector. The solutions aim to maximise the use of information to improve service delivery, back office administration and management planning.
Tribal is the IT and information management division of Tribal Group plc, the fastest growing company supporting the public sector today. The Group's activities cover the full spectrum of strategic and operational support services including consulting, property, technology, resourcing, training and communications.
Why did they come to us?
Tribal's Foundation Software Suite, which is delivered to over 50% of Local Authorities across the UK, uses address management functionality. They recognise that address management is increasingly important to today's businesses in their drive for increased efficiency, speed and delivery of service. Address Management begins with verifying addresses at the first point of contact with customers so that the address can be used throughout the organisation for billing, delivery of goods and maintaining contact with the customer - a key factor in building a long term business partnership.
The Foundation Software suite has incorporated address management functionality as part of the total software solution since 1982. In 1999, this part of their solution came up for review and Allies® were recommended by one of their Local Authority clients who were already a customer . The Foundation Software Suite incorporates Allies' Address Management functionality using PostCoder API Professional.
"When it was felt that the time had come to replace our existing supplier of address look-up software, we made a conscious decision to use Allies® based on the overall standard of the software and its benefits to our users" says a representative of Tribal.
Windows was the chosen development environment, because it was the standard environment for the majority of Local Government systems and a widely supported operating system.
What are the benefits?
Easy to integrate
The Foundation Software Suite, was originally developed using Visual Basic, .NET and Centura, although across the Tribal Group a range of other Windows development languages are used. PostCoder API offered examples in ten different development languages and gave the developers a range of searching functions, allowing them to integrate address lookup into their management solution with minimum additional development work.
Adrian Whittell, one of the software development team at Tribal, says "Most of the example applications in the API were used to enable us to fast track the development as much of the existing functionality was able to be duplicated in our own applications. The fuzzy address matching seems to work particularly well. This enables us to match a large number of addresses where the Postcode/premise combination is incorrect. We are also able to match an address to an LEA which has also proved useful for our customers."
FREE technical support
With every software purchase, in addition to functional requirements, customers need to know that they will be well supported both during the initial development stage and in the future. Allies® has always offered full technical support with all their software (from desktop to development packages) and provide free evaluations of all applications, so customers can be confident that the software is exactly what they require.
The Allies® sales team worked closely with the Tribal development team from the very beginning to ensure that they were getting the functionality their customers required. The two companies continue to work together on address management and the Tribal Technology development team are consulted during reviews and changes to the PostCoder API software and its additional components.
As Tribal found both the software functionality and the support offered by Allies® met their requirements, PostCoder API has now been integrated into their Foundation Software Suite.
Adrian Whittell, one of the senior developers at Tribal says, "Over 90% of our Local Authority Management software users take advantage of the PAF® data through the Allies® component, and are always very positive about its functionality"
Accurate address matches
The PostCoder® element of the software, utilising a proprietary indexed version of Royal Mail's Postcode Address File (PAF®) data, offers Foundation Software Suite users the ability to find accurate matches for what can often be poor quality address data coming from a wide range of sources. Its integration directly into the management application allows users to clean data as it is received from source.
Ordnance Survey Address Point Data
In addition, this element has become an essential part of Tribal's Schools Admissions System where accurate addressing is essential. Using the API and Allies' PCGRIDs add-on, the system can now calculate the shortest walking distance to a school to within a metre, assisting Local Authorities in assessing appropriate schools placements. PCGrids allows access to and querying of Ordnance Survey's AddressPoint TM data, offering 0.1m accuracy grid references for each PAF® address.
A two way relationship
Over the seven years that the two companies have been working together, Tribal's team have found the Allies Computing customer support team "very good, with always helpful and polite staff".
Allies® have also found the feedback from the Tribal developers during consultancy "helpful and useful in suggesting new directions and enhancements for our address management solutions". Says Peter Allies, Director and Project Manager at Allies Computing. "We have benefited from working with Tribal Technology on address management and GIS projects over the last seven years and are hopeful that the business partnership will continue for many more."
