Eircode - its implemetation (merged)

ukoda

gizmo555 wrote: »

If it's a postal code, why isn't An Post using it to sort and deliver post?

They are equipped to, they confirmed this, their mail sorting centres can use it.

But they can't use what isn't there. I.e. If people don't put it on letters they send, then there's no eircode for them to sort by.

This will change shortly, electric Ireland now issue all bills with eircodes and other utilities will surely follow, meaning there's going to be an increase in volume of eircode use (by millions of letters) making it possible for An Post to sort these by eircode

Sam Russell

Mod: Can we keep to the implementation of Eircode. Design questions are only on topic as far as it affects implementation.


An Post have said they will use it in the main sorting offices, but not otherwise yet.

gizmo555

ukoda wrote: »

They are equipped to, they confirmed this, their mail sorting centres can use it.

They confirmed to me that they are not currently using Eircode to look up the unique identifier in the codes.

They are not using the full code to look up delivery locations in the Eircode database and won't, until a lot more people include them in addresses. But why would people bother, if An Post is already delivering their mail perfectly well without them?

This is what they told me last month:

At the delivery stage the textual address is what is used by the Postal Operative to attempt delivery. With approximately three million mail items processed and delivered by An Post daily it would not be practical or economically viable to look up the Eircode to obtain the textual address. With regard to non-unique addresses (circa 40%) the Postperson relies on the actual surname and on occasion the first name as well to identify the delivery point that the mail item is for.

With an insufficient address there is no guarantee that the Eircode would be correct and an error in the Eircode could, if used to find a textual address, result in an incorrect textual address being used and consequently the mail item would be delivered to the wrong address.

An Post will use Eircodes in manual sorting and automated sequence sorting of Postpersons routes when the volume of mail containing correct Eircodes reaches a critical mass that makes this a viable approach to sorting mail. When this happens the correct postal address will still be required as the textual address is used by Postal Operatives on delivery.

So, we've spent €38m and counting on a postcode system and An Post cannot say when it will start actually using it in the way it was designed.

oscarBravo

gizmo555 wrote: »

So, we've spent €38m and counting on a postcode system and An Post cannot say when it will start actually using it in the way it was designed.

So what? What's your actual point here? That An Post should be forced to make their sorting system less efficient by using Eircode before it has achieved critical mass? That we shouldn't have postcodes, because the state-owned monopoly can manage without them?

I'm struggling to understand what, specifically, you're criticising here.

GJG

gizmo555 wrote: »

They confirmed to me that they are not currently using Eircode to look up the unique identifier in the codes.

They are not using the full code to look up delivery locations in the Eircode database and won't, until a lot more people include them in addresses. But why would people bother, if An Post is already delivering their mail perfectly well without them?

Well, by that token you appear to have proven that no existing postal system anywhere has ever introduced a postcode system.

gizmo555

oscarBravo wrote: »

I'm struggling to understand what, specifically, you're criticising here.

I'm criticising the facts that:

• €38m of public money has been spent on a postcode system that An Post didn't need or want;
• This sum is more than double the budgeted cost and almost double the higher end of the range of values for the projected benefits from Eircode (€6m to €20m) - so apparently, at best we'll get a return of half our investment;
• The Comptroller and Auditor General has stated that it is in any case uncertain that these benefits will actually be obtained;
• Lastly, on the basis of what An Post has stated above, it could be years before they actually fully use the system, or conceivably, never. There is, after all, no current advantage for mail users from including Eircodes in addresses. An Post could well be waiting indefinitely for its "critical mass". They were very coy with RTE last month, when it asked what percentage of mail has an Eircode, but said it was in "single figures".

oscarBravo

gizmo555 wrote: »

I'm criticising the facts that:

• €38m of public money has been spent on a postcode system that An Post didn't need or want;
• This sum is more than double the budgeted cost and almost double the higher end of the range of values for the projected benefits from Eircode (€6m to €20m) - so apparently, at best we'll get a return of half our investment;
• The Comptroller and Auditor General has stated that it is in any case uncertain that these benefits will actually be obtained;
• Lastly, on the basis of what An Post has stated above, it could be years before they actually fully use the system, or conceivably, never. There is, after all, no current advantage for mail users from including Eircodes in addresses. An Post could well be waiting indefinitely for its "critical mass". They were very coy with RTE last month, when it asked what percentage of mail has an Eircode, but said it was in "single figures".

Great. It doesn't matter whether any other postal operator will benefit from it; it doesn't matter whether any non-postal service provider will benefit from it; it doesn't matter whether it will make tax evasion or insurance fraud harder; it doesn't matter whether it will make the public's life easier from a satellite navigation perspective; it doesn't matter whether it will make the emergency services' job easier.

All that matters is that An Post, who didn't want a postcode in the first place, because it threatened their dominant market position, haven't fully replaced all their sorting systems within a year of introduction of postcodes.

The criticism of Eircode for criticism's sake is really getting old.

gizmo555

oscarBravo wrote: »

The criticism of Eircode for criticism's sake is really getting old.

BoatMad

gizmo555 wrote: »

I'm criticising the facts that:

• €38m of public money has been spent on a postcode system that An Post didn't need or want;
• This sum is more than double the budgeted cost and almost double the higher end of the range of values for the projected benefits from Eircode (€6m to €20m) - so apparently, at best we'll get a return of half our investment;
• The Comptroller and Auditor General has stated that it is in any case uncertain that these benefits will actually be obtained;
• Lastly, on the basis of what An Post has stated above, it could be years before they actually fully use the system, or conceivably, never. There is, after all, no current advantage for mail users from including Eircodes in addresses. An Post could well be waiting indefinitely for its "critical mass". They were very coy with RTE last month, when it asked what percentage of mail has an Eircode, but said it was in "single figures".

Eircode needs to be evaluated over a far longer term , 10 years plus IMHO.

An Post have strategic reasons not to use Eircode, and they are a major hinderance to its adoption as they have a say in the licensing of the Geo directory and as been reported it was the delay in agreeing access to GeoDirectory that was one of the issue that delayed Eircode

Every postal authority can deliver mail , without a post code , the UK certainly can. This si because unlike courier companies they have local knowledge

However in time , especially to courier companies . once their IT system are upgraded , Eircode will be a boon.

All the major utilities and the Revenue service have been upgrading their system to handle eircodes, so we are going to see a lot more of them about the place

Any new form of coding system , be it Eircode or not, would face similar implementation issues and delays

my3cents

At this stage I think it is still in An Posts best interests to try and sink Eircode. Its obvious really. Eircode makes it so much easier for any competitor to deliver if they invest in their IT systems that An Post isn't going to do anything that speeds up Eircodes implementation. If Eircode doesn't get used then An Post keep their monopoly due to local knowledge.

gizmo555

I note that all three of you are studiously ignoring the point that Eircode cost the public more than double what it was supposed to and that, at best, we'll get half of that back - although the actual outcome looks likely to be far worse.

Eircode is shaping fair to be the outgoing government's evoting.

The real cost of Ireland’s postal code project, Eircode, is around €38 million and it is not clear the expected benefits will be achieved, the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG) has found.

In his annual report for 2014, C&AG Seamus McCarthy said improved data matching was expected to be the main public sector benefit for the project, but Revenue has indicated this had largely been achieved through other developments, including the Local Property Tax register.

“It is not clear that benefits to the value projected [€6 million to €20 million] will be achieved as a result of the implementation of Eircode,” he said.

Eircode, the postal code project, was first mooted in 2006, and there were significant delays before its ultimate launch in July this year.

The C&AG’s report said the project costs increased substantially compared to the estimates on which the decisions to go ahead with it were based.

In 2009, the estimated cost of the project was €18 million over 18 months. Based on a review of costs to date and the outstanding obligations on current contracts, the cost is projected to be around €38 million.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/not-clear-if-38m-eircode-benefits-will-be-achieved-c-ag-1.2371170

oscarBravo

gizmo555 wrote: »

Eircode is shaping fair to be the outgoing government's evoting.

Yes. I use e-voting every day in my business. Adoption of e-voting is growing by the week. Garmin and Google have recently announced the completion of licensing, and that they'll be rolling out products based on e-voting in the near future. Major utilities will soon be adding e-voting information to their bills.

:rolleyes:

Yes, it's over budget. This is clearly a resounding shock, being the first government project in the history of the state to be delivered over budget and late.

ukoda

People forget that the bulk of the money spent on eircode was for public database encoding. The real waste of money here is that for a nation of 2.2 million address, there are over 20 times that amount of address records on siloed and duplicated government databases. Yes that's right, our 2.2 million addresses exist on government databases a total of 44 million times.

Any postcode would have incurred the cost of encoding this shambles of a system. The actual design cost of eircode was pretty reasonable, it's all that came after that caused the extra money to be spent

Alan_P

ukoda wrote: »

People forget that the bulk of the money spent on eircode was for public database encoding. The real waste of money here is that for a nation of 2.2 million address, there are over 20 times that amount of address records on siloed and duplicated government databases. Yes that's right, our 2.2 million addresses exist on government databases a total of 44 million times.

Any postcode would have incurred the cost of encoding this shambles of a system. The actual design cost of eircode was pretty reasonable, it's all that came after that caused the extra money to be spent

Those return on investment figures are nonsense. Eircode will save multiples of it's cost simply in reducing social welfare fraud, even if it's never once used to direct mail.

Sam Russell

Mod: This thread is about implementation, not a rehash of arguments already done to death. References to eVoting is not an implementation element. Start a new thread if you want to compare the two, but rehashing tired arguments - NO!

plodder

oscarBravo wrote: »

Garmin and Google have recently announced the completion of licensing, and that they'll be rolling out products

You seem to be implying here that garmin and google have announced all this with respect to eircode. Do you have any reference to this?

oscarBravo

plodder wrote: »

You seem to be implying here that garmin and google have announced all this with respect to eircode. Do you have any reference to this?

*sigh*

No, I don't.

If it suits you to believe that Google and Garmin are not planning to make their products work with Eircode, and that either (a) they have completed licence negotiations with Capita just for their own amusement or (b) Alex White is lying about said licences, you knock yourself out.

Like I said: opposition for its own sake.

plodder

oscarBravo wrote: »

*sigh*

No, I don't.

If it suits you to believe that Google and Garmin are not planning to make their products work with Eircode, and that either (a) they have completed licence negotiations with Capita just for their own amusement or (b) Alex White is lying about said licences, you knock yourself out.

Alex White was misinformed previously in relation to Eircode adoption. He can only go on the information he is given. So, frankly I won't believe it until I hear those companies say it themselves.

Like I said: opposition for its own sake.

Nothing to see here folks. Move along now ...

BoatMad

plodder wrote: »

You seem to be implying here that garmin and google have announced all this with respect to eircode. Do you have any reference to this?

Read through the various Eircode threads , on boards , you'll. See the public utterances of both Google and Garmin referenced

gizmo555

Alan_P wrote: »

Those return on investment figures are nonsense.

They may well be, but they are the official estimates referenced by the Comptroller and Auditor General in his report.

Alan_P wrote: »

Eircode will save multiples of it's cost simply in reducing social welfare fraud, even if it's never once used to direct mail.

Now, this is nonsense. How will this work, given that no applicant for social welfare payments (or any other public service) is obliged to provide an Eircode as part of their address?

Proponents of Eircode on these threads are very imaginative in coming up with all sorts of potential uses for Eircodes. Some of them may even work. But they are all ancillary to the intended use of Eircode as, to use the Eircode website's own description, "Ireland's postcode system". And we are in the farcical situation of having spent €38m on it, yet our national postal service cannot say when, if ever, it will begin using it as it was designed to be used.

BoatMad

gizmo555 wrote: »

They may well be, but they are the official estimates referenced by the Comptroller and Auditor General in his report.



Now, this is nonsense. How will this work, given that no applicant for social welfare payments (or any other public service) is obliged to provide an Eircode as part of their address?

Proponents of Eircode on these threads are very imaginative in coming up with all sorts of potential uses for Eircodes. Some of them may even work. But they are all ancillary to the intended use of Eircode as, to use the Eircode website's own description, "Ireland's postcode system". And we are in the farcical situation of having spent €38m on it, yet our national postal service cannot say when, if ever, it will begin using it as it was designed to be used.

No doubt an post will have its arm twisted , it's already able to use eircodes in its sorting offices.

Payback is a very elusive things for this sort of thing, it's really an investment get a long number of years.

As more and more sat navs and mapping systems integrate Eircodes, it's usefulness will increase

As more utilities say " what's your Eircode sir or madam ", more will remember and use it.

Alan_P

gizmo555 wrote: »

They may well be, but they are the official estimates referenced by the Comptroller and Auditor General in his report.



Now, this is nonsense. How will this work, given that no applicant for social welfare payments (or any other public service) is obliged to provide an Eircode as part of their address?.

Even if applicants aren't obliged to provide an Eircode (which I suspect will change very quickly anyway), they can be "invited" to. Those that don't will automatically be flagging themselves for further investigation. Even aside from applicants providing it, the mere fact that every dwelling in the country now has a unique code will greatly simplify the task of identifying multiple fradulent applications from slight variations of the same address.

marmurr1916

gizmo555 wrote: »

They may well be, but they are the official estimates referenced by the Comptroller and Auditor General in his report.



Now, this is nonsense. How will this work, given that no applicant for social welfare payments (or any other public service) is obliged to provide an Eircode as part of their address?

Proponents of Eircode on these threads are very imaginative in coming up with all sorts of potential uses for Eircodes. Some of them may even work. But they are all ancillary to the intended use of Eircode as, to use the Eircode website's own description, "Ireland's postcode system". And we are in the farcical situation of having spent €38m on it, yet our national postal service cannot say when, if ever, it will begin using it as it was designed to be used.

What is wrong with suggesting different ways of implementing Eircodes which may be beneficial to society?

Red Alert

With any system (software, or otherwise), its requirements determine how it works and what it does. What's clear from above is that Eircode's requirement were either invented or not elucidated well... an post say they didn't need it. So what has driven its implementation in that case?

Using the eircode as a database key is fine in theory, but in Eircode's case the database is/was implemented as a revenue-generating service, access to which requires a fee and a per-lookup charge that the company is supposed to keep tabs on. There is an argument when humans are going to read codes for them to have some meaning. For example, car registrations, credit card numbers (which do have a known structure), IBANs, flight numbers. Taking the aviation examples you can easily go online and get the definitive meaning of the carrier codes, IATA codes and ICAO codes without having to pay anybody. Eircode on the other hand actively obfuscate and downplay the meaning of the routing key to avoid its vernacular use.

plodder

BoatMad wrote: »

Read through the various Eircode threads , on boards , you'll. See the public utterances of both Google and Garmin referenced

I've been following the threads. I'm not aware of any public utterances from either.

SterlingArcher

oscarBravo wrote: »

Great. It doesn't matter whether any other postal operator will benefit from it; it doesn't matter whether any non-postal service provider will benefit from it; it doesn't matter whether it will make tax evasion or insurance fraud harder; it doesn't matter whether it will make the public's life easier from a satellite navigation perspective; it doesn't matter whether it will make the emergency services' job easier.

All that matters is that An Post, who didn't want a postcode in the first place, because it threatened their dominant market position, haven't fully replaced all their sorting systems within a year of introduction of postcodes.

The criticism of Eircode for criticism's sake is really getting old.

That is alot of it doesn't matter. I wouldn't go championing Eircode just yet. Might spare you some blushes.

marmurr1916

gizmo555 wrote: »

This is what they told me last month:

At the delivery stage the textual address is what is used by the Postal Operative to attempt delivery. With approximately three million mail items processed and delivered by An Post daily it would not be practical or economically viable to look up the Eircode to obtain the textual address. With regard to non-unique addresses (circa 40%) the Postperson relies on the actual surname and on occasion the first name as well to identify the delivery point that the mail item is for.

With an insufficient address there is no guarantee that the Eircode would be correct and an error in the Eircode could, if used to find a textual address, result in an incorrect textual address being used and consequently the mail item would be delivered to the wrong address.

So what An Post have said that the postmen and postwomen delivering the post don't use Eircodes when looking at envelopes and packages but look at the textual address instead?

I'm struggling to understand how this is different from how postmen and postwomen deliver mail in any other country.

Eircodes are being implemented by An Post at the final leg (delivery by a postal delivery worker) in the same way that postcodes are implemented by pretty much any postal service - the postman or postwoman looks at the textual part of the address and then delivers it to that address. I know for a fact that UK postmen and postwomen don't rely solely on postcodes for delivery because at my previous UK address I often had mail delivered that used the wrong postcode even though the textual part of the address was correct.

What we already know is that if an item of mail is posted with just an Eircode on it, it will be delivered by An Post as they will look up the Eircode and add the full address to the item of mail so that the postman/postwoman can deliver it.

This method of implementing Eircode is pretty much what would happen in the UK if I posted an item of mail with just someone's street number and postcode.

The postcode would be looked up and the rest of the textual postal address would be added to the item of mail so that the postman or postwoman would be able to deliver it.

I don't think that any postal service expects its delivery postmen and delivery postwomen to look up postcodes on items of mail to see what the full textual postal address is when they're in the process of delivering mail on their postal delivery rounds.

gizmo555 wrote: »

An Post will use Eircodes in manual sorting and automated sequence sorting of Postpersons routes when the volume of mail containing correct Eircodes reaches a critical mass that makes this a viable approach to sorting mail. When this happens the correct postal address will still be required as the textual address is used by Postal Operatives on delivery.

Again we have An Post reiterating that the postmen and postwomen rely on having a textual address to deliver mail, which is true of other countries. As for manual sorting and automated sequencing of postal delivery routes, the critical mass should be reached quite soon now that Electric Ireland have decided to use Eircodes when sending bills and other letters to their customers. So An Post will be implementing Eircodes for these aspects of its operation.

marmurr1916

Red Alert wrote: »

With any system (software, or otherwise), its requirements determine how it works and what it does. What's clear from above is that Eircode's requirement were either invented or not elucidated well... an post say they didn't need it. So what has driven its implementation in that case?

Using the eircode as a database key is fine in theory, but in Eircode's case the database is/was implemented as a revenue-generating service, access to which requires a fee and a per-lookup charge that the company is supposed to keep tabs on. There is an argument when humans are going to read codes for them to have some meaning. For example, car registrations, credit card numbers (which do have a known structure), IBANs, flight numbers. Taking the aviation examples you can easily go online and get the definitive meaning of the carrier codes, IATA codes and ICAO codes without having to pay anybody. Eircode on the other hand actively obfuscate and downplay the meaning of the routing key to avoid its vernacular use.

D01 to D24 are already pretty much in 'vernacular use'. As the example I've posted on this thread earlier shows, other routing keys are being used by private enterprise to publicise service delivery areas.

Vex Willems

I got a parcel today from the UK for something I bought on eBay, had my eircode on the address with Germany scribbled out below it and I.E. written along side address.

Dunno who spotted and fixed the error and if eircode had any help in it being delivered but I got it anyway!

plodder

marmurr1916 wrote: »

D01 to D24 are already pretty much in 'vernacular use'. As the example I've posted on this thread earlier shows, other routing keys are being used by private enterprise to publicise service delivery areas.

The Dublin routing keys are okay for that purpose because they are all quite small, but say you want to serve Limerick city, but not East Clare or North Kerry, or if you want to serve Gort in East Galway, but not parts of Mayo that are an hour and half's drive away, then you're out of luck unfortunately. Or at least if you're delivering pizzas, then they'll be quite cold by the time you get there.

So, for example you could get an order in your pizza shop in Gort for two addresses:

H91 R2Y9 and H91 V8P3. You can't tell by looking at the code where exactly they are.

The first one is in the town of Gort - great. The second one is a very scenic 68 mile drive around Lough Mask and over the Partry mountains to Srahlea in Co Mayo.