Melissa Data In the News


 
 

New Summit Media Builds New Apps with
Melissa Data
 

Address Object and GeoCoder Object are key to new search tool

Founded in 1995, New Summit Media, based in Kansas City, provides a wide range of Web development and data management services to its clients. A concept-to-finish communications and data resource, the company focuses on transforming status quo systems into dynamic, up-to-date, personalized tools.

In a typical assignment, the company recently produced a personalized statement of benefits application for a client. After working with the client to develop a generic form that summarized each employee’s wages and benefit choices, New Summit Media converted that form into a PDF, managed the data merge to populate the statement for each employee, and helped coordinate the printing and shipping of all of the statements. “We do a bundled package for each employee,” said Ray Grauberger, a systems engineer. “We help coordinate all of the distribution, management and fulfillment.” In total, the application generates over 1.1 million personalized statements.

In addition to creating applications, New Summit Media designs, builds, and hosts Web sites for its clients. The company has four media designers and three programmers, who can develop applications in a variety of languages. And, it operates its own data center, which is available 24x7. The data center supports MS SQL Server and MySQL and also has some applications running on FoxPro and Microsoft Access.

New Application Development

In a recent assignment, New Summit Media was asked to develop a Web site where employees of the retail giant Wal-Mart could locate dentists in their health plan. The goal, said Grauberger, “was to provide an online search tool for every Wal-Mart associate in the United States.”
The plan was this. Every month, New Summit Media would receive a feed from Delta Dental, which provides dental health insurance to Wal-Mart employees, listing all the dental providers currently enrolled in the program. New Summit Media would then repopulate the database and geocode the records. Employees could then enter their ZIP® codes into a Web form and receive a list of providers within a 10, 20 or even 100-mile radius of their location. The results could also be re-sorted according to the specialty of each dentist.

Effective geocoding was critical to the application. Several years earlier, New Summit Media had invested in geocoding technology but, Grauberger said, it was expensive, cumbersome to use and not well supported technically. “My task was to find a product that would work better and be more user-friendly,” he said.

Working with Melissa Data

In his search for better geocoding technology, Grauberger discovered several providers including Melissa Data Corp. Based in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA, Melissa Data provides easy-to-use and cost-effective data quality solutions with emphasis on address and phone verification, postal encoding, and data enhancements. Melissa Data’s GeoCoder Object appends latitude and longitude coordinates to the ZIP + 4® level of an address. ”I started exploring several companies but theirs looked the most attractive,” Grauberger said.

Indeed, Melissa Data provided access to example source code on their Web site and Grauberger received immediate access to Melissa Data’s technical support team. “I wasn’t waiting for 24 to 48 hours,” he said. He was able to quickly build a demo of the proposed Web site. “I wanted to see it work. I wanted to see how fast I could produce the product and tell people this is what we need,” Grauberger said. “Using their example source code, we generated the exact site we wanted with a minimal amount of development time.”

In addition to the GeoCoder Object, Grauberger integrated Melissa Data’s Address Object into the application as well. Address Object validates addresses to the highest level of accuracy - the physical delivery point. Now, when Wal-Mart associates enter their address to locate a dental provider in their region, the Address Object validates the address and generates a ZIP + 4 code, which is passed to the GeoCoder. The latitude and longitude of the employee address is then compared to the locations of the dental providers.

New Markets

New Summit Media’s use of Melissa Data’s GeoCoder Object and Address Object has been so successful, the company now plans to use them to help them expand their market. “We are getting into bulk mail fulfillment,” said Grauberger. “Melissa Data will help us develop our own tool and create more integrated products. This will enable us to go after a larger market than we are right now.”

In the final analysis, Grauberger said, “I am really happy with what Melissa Data is doing with their tools.” Each quarter he receives updates and they inevitably run flawlessly. “There has never been a glitch,” he noted. “The product is easy to work with and the documentation is good. These are people you want to work with. They want to fulfill your every need.”