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 Tech
Firm Reaches Out to Higher Education for Address
Cleansing
With so many employees, students, vendors and
thousands of applicants – today’s universities are
like a mini-city. Runner Technologies helps
universities and colleges meet the need for clean,
accurate data with real-time and batch address
verification solutions.
Runner Technologies provides technology solutions
for address verification and web-based applications
to federal, state and city governments, as well as
the private sector. But in the past several years,
the Boca Raton, Fla.-based firm has focused on
providing address verification solutions to
universities and colleges across the country.
“Universities have a substantial amount of
employees. It’s like a mini-city,” says Kevin
Runner, the firm’s president. Clean, accurate data
is critical here, especially since universities have
so much information piling in from various sources.
Runner Technologies specializes in data quality
software, survey management, CRM sales systems, HR
performance management and development tools.
Runner’s CLEAN_Address can seamlessly integrate with
higher education systems, such as Banner and
PeopleSoft. The company provides a seamless
integration for CLEAN_Address within SunGard Higher
Education's Banner suite, providing real-time and
batch verification throughout the entire system.
“Higher education is a good percentage of our
business,” Runner says.
CLEAN_Address is a development component for
verifying and standardizing global addresses through
Oracle-based applications. Addresses can be verified
using a PL/SQL procedure call. This saves data-entry
time, protects against fraud, reduces costs of
re-shipping and allows duplicate address detection.
Here are some of CLEAN_Addresses’ verification
components:
• Address verification and standardization –
company, street, city, state, Postal Code, ZIP + 4®
, county, etc.
• Name parsing and genderizing – parses name into
five components and returns gender code.
• Telephone area code and prefix – corrects split
area codes and data entry errors
• Email address parsing and verification – syntax
checking, parsing and validating domain names.
• GeoCoding – return latitude and longitude for U.S.
addresses.
CLEAN_Address also enables colleges and universities
to verify addresses inputted onto school websites in
real-time. Runner sees this as a huge benefit as
students are notorious for being a very mobile
group. Students are known for changing addresses
every year.
The next big venture for Runner is to find a way to
make NCOALink TM an in-house service. Right now,
NCOALink TM is outsourced. The service searches your
database for the individuals, families and
businesses that have moved and filed a change of
address with the USPS® in the last 18 or 48 months.
Runner says some schools might feel queasy about
using NCOALink TM, as it’s still outsourced. “Data
might be compromised,” he says. As a result,
Runner’s future goal is to incorporate change of
address updating into its data quality solutions
package.
Runner Technologies is a partner with Melissa Data
for its address verification services.
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