Eircode - its implemetation (merged)

gctest50 wrote: »

I see the Loc8 twitter is getting more cretinous

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3pw1bKWAAAl2C3.jpg

I've posted the tweet about myself on the other thread. I wonder how many hours per day these guys (or maybe it's just one person?) spend ranting about the evils of Eircodes? 
Lads, ye lost out to a different system and a different company. 
Get over it, move on and do something constructive with your lives.

Bray Head wrote: »

I find it strange that eircode still puts in Dublin 2 and D02. To me it seems redundant.

I think in an Oireachtas hearing about two years back someone from eircode or DCENR said that many people feel that 'Dublin 2' is part of their address, and to suggest removing it in favour of just using the eircode might, ironically, bring about resistance to using eircode.

It seems people in other cities feel the same too:

Trade Facilitation Agreement Facility
World Trade Organization

Centre William Rappard
Rue de Lausanne 154
CH-1211
Geneva 21
Switzerland

http://www.tfafacility.org/trade-facilitation-agreement-enters-force-1

The postcode is 1211 (the CH prefix stands for Switzerland, not strictly required), but the address still includes the postal district of Geneva 21, despite the fact that Switzerland has had four-digit postcodes for decades.



Similarly with this address which includes the postal district of Praha 5 (Prague 5) even though there's a five-digit postcode in the address.

It's not exactly unusual to see old postal or other districts incorporated into modern postcodes.

Paris addresses are in the format 750XX, where 75 is the numeric code for the administrative area of the Ville de Paris* and the rest is basically the arrondissement (district) number. For example, addresses in the 8th Arrondissement of Paris will generally have the postcode 75008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris

Basically 75008 is a fancy way of saying Paris 8 and it's got as much (or as little) granularity as if it were Paris 8, unless there's a Cedex suffix attached.

*French Départements, roughly the equivalent of counties, are given numbers: http://www.map-france.com/departments/) which usually appear in the first two numbers of postcodes within those départements. Paris is treated as if it were the equivalent of a département.

Similarly in New York city, once upon a time divided into postal districts such as New York 1 etc.

New York 1 was assigned the zip code 10001 when they were introduced.

City Post offering discounts for business users who use Eircodes:

Businesses will be offered postal discounts to encourage them to make greater use of Eircode, the struggling address coding system introduced in 2015 at a projected cost to the state of €38m.

CityPost, a private distribution company that entered the postal market in January, is planning the discounts as part of a package of incentives aimed at winning business from heavy users of the postal system. “We would be a fan of Eircode,” said Ian Glass, chief executive of CityPost.

“We’re going to bring out a postal tariff that has an extra discount if business customers put the Eircode on at least 90% of their mail. Eircode is here and it should be used. We are going to encourage bulk mailers to get their databases Eircoded because there will be an extra discount. There are services that can Eircode your databases for you. It doesn’t have to be a hugely cumbersome exercise.”

An Post has no plans to offer Eircode discounts, claiming it can sort post efficiently without relying on the seven-character national address code. Many operators in the freight and distribution industry have criticised Eircode as unsuitable.

http://www.citypost.ie/news/citypost-to-deliver-eircode-discounts.php

Struggling?

@autoaddress 4 hours ago

282,792 #Eircode API calls so far today

plodder wrote: »

http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/under-10-of-shipping-companies-use-eircode-446418.html

Irish Examiner today. Sounds like it's struggling to me.

Is it losing money or something?

It's not a profit-making enterprise, it's a piece of public infrastructure.

KPMG along with Services advisor CBRE and the Freight Transport Association of Ireland have published the second annual Ireland Logistics & Supply Chain Confidence Index which found 92% of companies that replied to their survey say “they have not adapted their business processes in order to exploit Eircode”.

The same survey last year found 96% of companies did not adapt their business to use Eircode.

How many companies were sent the survey? It seems only 52 replies were sent back:

A total of 52 companies responded to the survey, including businesses such as Aer Lingus Cargo, DHL, and the Musgrave group. Logistics firms accounted for 27 of respondents, while shipping companies made up the rest of those surveyed.

Without knowing how many companies were asked to take part in the survey, it's impossible to know if 52 responses is even close to a representative sample or not, especially since we don't even know who the survey was directed at. Was it all shipping and logistics companies registered in Ireland or only a sample of those companies? If just a sample, what were the criteria used to select the sample? What percentage of the selected sample do the responses represent?

Even with the completely inadequate information presented in the report, we can see that 8% of the companies that replied have adapted their business processes to use Eircodes, compared to only 4% last year.

Assuming the increase continues at the same rate, in six years time approximately one in three of these companies will have adapted their processes to use Eircodes, with about 50% set to use them within 10 years.

A reasonably quick adoption time frame and very good market penetration for a service that's got pretty much no marketing budget at all.

Extracts from the 2016 report:

When asked if the introduction of the Eircode postcode system has been a positive development for the Irish market from their perspective, two thirds of respondents said it has been positive. Perhaps not surprisingly, shippers are more enthusiastic about the benefits that the adoption of
Eircode has been with 73% of shipping respondents describing its development as positive. Meanwhile, only 55% of logistics companies say that the development of Eircode is positive.

...

When asked if they believed that their firm would enjoy a net gain from the introduction of the Eircode postcode system, surprisingly 83% of respondents said no. It is stark that 89% of respondents in the logistics sector say that their businesses are unlikely to enjoy a net gain from the introduction of Eircode, while 77% of respondents in the shipping sector are also of this
view.

https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/pdf/2016/06/ie-cbre-ireland-logistics-sector-outlook.pdf