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Eircode - its implemetation (merged)

beveragelady

I called An Post today to try to sort out a problem with deliveries. The customer service chap was very helpful and I think it all got sorted.
The thing is, I tried to give him my Eircode because I live at a vague rural address but he said that they're not using them because the system isn't set up.
Amazed!
It's bad enough that they're no good to users of satnavs or google maps, but this is just astonishing. Can anybody explain how this could have been launched to such fanfare when it's all but meaningless?

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BonnieSituation

tubbs26 wrote: »

Eircodes will be like every initiative in this country, like leap cards, uproar at first and within a couple of years we will be using them without thinking with no thanks for the people that introduced it

You forgot about the people who then continue to whinge about it long after it has been proven to be useful and better than what went before.

plodder

TheChizler wrote: »

I'm suggesting it because of quotes from an Post saying they've installed the system in their sorting centres and PDVerse saying they specifically use the routing key in sorting centres when manually sorting mail; that is, anything larger than a normal envelope.

That's the one place where An Post didn't need to use them. The one place they would have been useful is for local delivery in order to disambiguate non unique addresses, but they don't do that. That is where the vaunted local knowledge of their delivery staff comes into play.

The one area where everyone acknowledges Eircodes as being useful is for navigation to address points and locating services like Costa shops, which has nothing to do with the post.

PDVerse

plodder wrote: »

That's the one place where An Post didn't need to use them. The one place they would have been useful is for local delivery in order to disambiguate non unique addresses, but they don't do that. That is where the vaunted local knowledge of their delivery staff comes into play.

I'm not a postal expert, but it was my job during the design phase to meet with experts from An Post to ensure the postcode design met their requirements.

I held 20+ meetings and workshops with An Post, and can summarise their top three requirements as follows:
1. Sortation
2. Sortation
3. Sortation

An Post didn't have a need to disambiguate non unique addresses. They are unique as an organisation in Ireland in this regard. The benefits of a postcode to An Post are the manual sortation capabilities of the Routing Key, and the automatic sortation capabilities of the full Eircode to allow automated full route sort to a postal delivery persons bag. The more Eircode is used on post, the more An Post will use Eircode.

Plodder, using definitive language such as "the one place they would or would not have been useful to An Post" when you have no knowledge of their requirements suggests you haven't started either of my book recommendations, which I thoroughly recommend.

plodder

PDVerse wrote: »

I'm not a postal expert, but it was my job during the design phase to meet with experts from An Post to ensure the postcode design met their requirements.

I held 20+ meetings and workshops with An Post, and can summarise their top three requirements as follows:
1. Sortation
2. Sortation
3. Sortation

An Post didn't have a need to disambiguate non unique addresses. They are unique as an organisation in Ireland in this regard. The benefits of a postcode to An Post are the manual sortation capabilities of the Routing Key, and the automatic sortation capabilities of the full Eircode to allow automated full route sort to a postal delivery persons bag. The more Eircode is used on post, the more An Post will use Eircode.

Plodder, using definitive language such as "the one place they would or would not have been useful to An Post" when you have no knowledge of their requirements suggests you haven't started either of my book recommendations, which I thoroughly recommend.

They didn't need a postcode at all. That's not just my opinion; they said this. Everything they have said since then, is just an exercise in fitting in with something they don't need, but have been paid to use.

When the original postcode board reported, they recommended a postcode structure not based on An Post's unusual requirements in this regard.

PDVerse

plodder wrote: »

They didn't need a postcode at all. That's not just my opinion; they said this. Everything they have said since then, is just an exercise in fitting in with something they don't need, but have been paid to use.

When the original postcode board reported, they recommended a postcode structure not based on An Post's unusual requirements in this regard.

When did they say they didn't need a postcode? Perhaps prior to the tender for a postcode, one that they also tendered for? Their views evolved. Your assertion that they are merely pretending is a conspiracy theory at odds with the facts. The 2005 report was six years old when the postcode tender started again. It was improved upon, quite substantially. I'm afraid we are never going to agree that a postcode design shouldn't have been based around the requirements of the Universal Service Provider, like every other postcode ever designed. The difference with Eircode is it was the first postcode design that took into account the requirements of other users, and most notably the public interest.

TheChizler

echat wrote: »

Here is a Journal article from June 2017 where An Post state that they are not using them for letter delivery: http://www.thejournal.ie/an-post-eircode-3422228-Jun2017/

Here is an article where An Post state that less than 5% of all the post it handles has an Eircode more than two years after the launch: http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/an-post-admits-very-low-usage-of-38m-eircode-463528.html

That percentage would move towards my 1% estimate if it was % of users rather than items. Nevertheless I am prepared to double no triple my estimate ... to 3%.

I didn't mention anything about letter delivery, I specifically said they were used in sorting centres, which your own link reiterates.

Skedaddle

No accurate addresses and codes suited An Post as it was a technical barrier to entry. It may not have been constructed as one but it was a happy coincidence for them for quite a long time.

Eircode effectively opened the delivery market as well as being useful for a lot of other things.

The reality is that Ireland's quirky (a polite way of describing it) addressing system is an absolute mess. It should have never been allowed to evolve that way but nobody took any control over managing it. Neither the post office nor the local authorities ever seemed to give a damn what way it worked and addresses just evolved in a completely organic and often totally illogical way, without any motion that they were an element of criticical infrastructure.

Eircode is basically just an overlay that effectively bypasses that chaos. It's something that most developed countries haven't had to do because none that I'm aware of have that level of chaotic addressing in the first instance.

It's a decent solution to a very unusual problem. The alternative was to reform addresses which could have taken decades to undo the chaos that had been allowed to form.

BowWow

Guys, eircode is here, it's here to stay, its use is growing on a daily basis. This thread is about it's implementation.
Some of the posters on this forum need to get over themselves. Constantly going off on tangents about what should have been the system or what should be changed is a waste of everybody's time.
It is what it is.. and it's not going to be redesigned..

plodder

PDVerse wrote: »

When did they say they didn't need a postcode?

In 2003, they said it was "a 1960s solution to a 21st century problem" and "with modern technology, a postcode is neither necessary nor particularly useful for purpose of mails processing" because they had developed their own scanning system and the geodirectory which the Eircode databases are derived from.

Attachment not found.

The postcode board naturally recommended that any postcode design should be neutral and not aligned with the USP. Considering the decline in the flat mail business since then, that recommendation is even more valid now.

Perhaps prior to the tender for a postcode, one that they also tendered for? Their views evolved. Your assertion that they are merely pretending is a conspiracy theory at odds with the facts. The 2005 report was six years old when the postcode tender started again. It was improved upon, quite substantially. I'm afraid we are never going to agree that a postcode design shouldn't have been based around the requirements of the Universal Service Provider, like every other postcode ever designed. The difference with Eircode is it was the first postcode design that took into account the requirements of other users, and most notably the public interest.

I'm sure we never will agree on any of the above. What about the freight transport people? What public consultation took place?

I see the "shut the conversation down" brigade are out now. It wasn't me who started this recent discussion on hierarchical postcodes. It was yourself PDverse.

Skedaddle

There's no shut down the conversation brigade. It's just that you can't unbake a cake.

The system is rolled out and there was significant work put into developing and promoting it. The biggest issue probably having been the development of APIs and software interfaces for connecting it to existing systems. It has a pretty decent set of technical specs for using it.

Yes it has flaws, I think routing keys are the biggest one as they don't follow any logic other than in the Dublin area and to an extent in Cork. The rest of them are seemingly randomly sized and pretty illogical. I assume they just mapped some kind of An Post sorting codes or something like that, as they make very little sense otherwise. In the long run, I'm not sure that it will particularly matter as the codes are used for a specific purpose, more like a phone number or a URL than a UK style postal code. They just link to a specific address.

The main thing is that it's given every address a unique code and it's already available on a number of free mapping services, notably Google Maps and it is most definitely in use by a lot of companies other than An Post for inputting addresses.

The use of this by An Post for sorting letters is frankly neither here nor there. If they want to use it to generate internal efficiencies, great. If they don't, and they are just ignoring the codes on envelopes, why does anyone particularly care? That's really a matter for An Post's management, not public policy.

The issue is that Eircode is a piece of national infrastructure that anyone who wants to find an Irish address can use. You can look it up via their website, via Google maps or several other ways and I assume that over time (and these companies are incredibly slow at times) it will start popping up in more and more sat nav systems in cars and so on.

It isn't a 'post code' in the sense that it's neither owned by the post office nor particularly adapted to suit their internal systems. It's actually a rather unusual example of a national geolocation of addresses system that was developed by an agency other than a postal operator.

I think the notion that you need to continue to include your entire address with the Eircode on envelopes is just An Post being pedantic.

In reality all you should need is the top line(s) for the postman/woman to figure out as the sortation system should be delivering the bundle of mail to the route using the Eircode.

So something like

John Murphy
13 Main Street (= bit for postal worker)
Dublin D99 X1PQ (= bit for sorting system)

or

Mary Smith
An Teach Mor (= bit for postal worker)
Baile Beag (= bit for postal worker)
Co. Thiobraid Árann Y99 X1PQ (= bit for sorting system)

There should be absolutely no need for, except that An Post has adopted a "nothing shall change!!!!!" type nonsense.

12 Any Street
Stoneybatter
Dublin 7
D07 XXYY

That's both confusing, long winded and duplicating information that's already clear and both human and machine readable.

To me, it just looks like An Post was basically dragging its feet and ultimately implemented this on the basis that nothing will change in addressing at all and it's an optional and supplemental thing.

It's a very weird situation where by a state was unable to get the state-owned postal service to cooperate on this properly. Effectively what Eircode did was bypass decades of non-movement on rolling out postal codes.

What should have happened here, but didn't was a rationalisation of addresses 50+ years ago and a numerical postal code system the same as everywhere else. But, instead we just kept working with the pre WWII system and barely modernised it at all, then basically came up with a very complex kludge to make it function with an optical scanning system when things were automated.

Eircode should at the very least make An Post's optical scanning requirements a lot less complicated and improve accuracy as reading a single unique code is a hell of a lot easier than reading multiple lines of often hand written text and then trying to match those to a database, particularly when you will get umpteen versions of some addresses and potentially in two languages.

It would seem logical that Eircode use would improve An Post's sortation system's accuracy and reliability as more postal items have the code on the front of them.

antoinolachtnai

There is very little reason for An Post to invest in software for improving the sorting of letters.

An Post already have more capacity than they need because the letters business is dying (as has been said).

Equally, there is not much point in senders of post investing in coding their postal address databases because they simply won’t get any benefit from doing so.

L1011

Google Maps have decided to change the spelling of my street name to a version nobody has ever, ever used - and as a result people have stopped finding it. Flooring fitters today gave up fighting it after a few minutes, asked for eircode and found the house in seconds then.

Suspect they weren't expecting me to actually know it immediately hence didn't ask for it, but I can just about remember my staff number from a job I left in 2006 and various defunct credit card numbers so I rarely forget short strings :pac:

Skedaddle

On a related topic, why does Google Maps and also sometimes Apple Maps alternate between Irish only and bilingual.

Even in my Toyota maps on the car, I can't understand the satnav half the time as it puts up places in Irish and I don't know where they are. I mean places like midlands small towns that I would never have heard said in Irish.

plodder

Skedaddle wrote: »

It's just that you can't unbake a cake.

I suppose you could throw it out and bake a new one, but that's not what I'm suggesting. A couple of times now I've suggested a way forward, which is to allow some basic usage of the data for free equivalent to what you can do with the UK postcode for free (eg a table of eircodes and their small area code), but radar silence on that unfortunately. You either support Eircode in its entirety or you're a whinger it seems.

echat

PDVerse wrote: »

I'm not a postal expert, but it was my job during the design phase to meet with experts from An Post to ensure the postcode design met their requirements.

I held 20+ meetings and workshops with An Post, and can summarise their top three requirements as follows:
1. Sortation
2. Sortation
3. Sortation

An Post didn't have a need to disambiguate non unique addresses. They are unique as an organisation in Ireland in this regard. The benefits of a postcode to An Post are the manual sortation capabilities of the Routing Key, and the automatic sortation capabilities of the full Eircode to allow automated full route sort to a postal delivery persons bag. The more Eircode is used on post, the more An Post will use Eircode.

Plodder, using definitive language such as "the one place they would or would not have been useful to An Post" when you have no knowledge of their requirements suggests you haven't started either of my book recommendations, which I thoroughly recommend.

That's the sad truth when it should have been:

1. Adoption
2. Adoption
3. Adoption

ianobrien

I live out in the sticks and I had ordered something online. As the form asked for a postcode I stuck down the Eircode, and my phone number.

Que the day before the promised delivery date when I was expecting the phone call to give directions ("turn here, turn there, after the 5 house on the left, yada, yada"). I was out the front doing some tiding up when the UPS van comes up the road, stops at the gate and says "Sir, I've your package here". Eircode brought him straight to the door (or gate in this case).

Talking to the delivery driver, Eircode has made his life much easier as rural deliveries are much quicker (no more phoning and trying to decipher gibberish directions) and he can plan the route much more efficiently. I also got my parcel quicker.

Skedaddle

It's definitely a major improvement especially for package delivery but I still think in certain urban and not so urban areas where you'd a lot of infill and self build, there's absolutely chaotic street addresses. We could still do with a clean up of house numbering.

Also (and this is an issue in the UK too) there's a lot of commercial addresses like

Mom's Friendly Robots
Mom Corp House (no unit / building number)
Fururama Technology Park
Dublin 24
D24 XXXX

Or

Mom's Friendly Robots
Corporate House
Abbey Street (No building number)
Dublin 2

The amount of times I've had to resort to looking up Google maps for stuff that would be findable from the street address anywhere else is ridiculous.
Britian also has his issue. In most countries buildings that are named also have a street address with a number.

Same with apartments :

12 Ivory Towers
Dundrum
Dublin 14

Instead of
Apt. 12 Ivory Towers
147 Main Street
Dundrum
Dublin 14

I've spent ages thing to find addresses like that where you end up rolling down the window asking and nobody knows where they are because they're new and unfamiliar. It's crazy that they can't accept that addresses actually are for finding things. They're not ceremonial things that are mentioned to be deeply cryptic.

A few Irish tech parks used block numbering which makes soooooooooo much sense!

Mom Corp Holdings
2001 Cork Airport Business Park
Cork
T12 0000

beauf

Almost all of the examples given as how Eircode is useful are not unique to Eircode. They are the same for any post code system. Every alternative coding system would have had the same advantages.

The disadvantages in Eircode are mostly unique to Eircode I would assume.

At this point is done. So it's entirely pointless discussing it further.

TheChizler

Of course there are plenty advantages unique to Eircode, it's one of the only (if not the only) single address identifying postcodes in the world. There are many useful things you can do with that as listed in this thread.

Also who said the way it's implemented had to be unique to Eircode for it to be relevant to this thread? These are all things we couldn't do before on any sort of widespread scale.

People implement new usage of Eircode constantly, implementation is never done. Many people find it interesting and feel that there is a point discussing it.

beauf

My point was all these "someone managed to find my address" stories are a little underwhelming. We are just coming out of the dark ages.

beauf

tubbs26 wrote: »

Eircodes will be like every initiative in this country, like leap cards, uproar at first and within a couple of years we will be using them without thinking with no thanks for the people that introduced it

Leap cards are great. But there's lots of odd stuff around that for example why they work entirely differently between bud and train. I know why that happens but to people from other countries who has all this sorted 20yrs ago it must seem a little odd.

We seem to have an issue with any sort of criticism so it's all dismissed as whinging. So people don't bother.

swampgas

beauf wrote: »

My point was all these "someone managed to find my address" stories are a little underwhelming. We are just coming out of the dark ages.

If you ever lived in the country at a non-unique address it might feel a lot less underwhelming. I lived for years in west Cork and the hassle with any kind of delivery was endless. What's interesting to me about the stories here is finding out what the trend is, and who is using eircodes.

We heard that couriers wouldn't use them, that trades people wouldn't use them, that people wouldn't remember them and wouldn't provide them.
Although I think uptake was a little slow until Google maps integration.

beauf

Most systems need a critical mass before its own momentum carries it forward.

Google map links made finding everything easier even without Eircode. Not that a Google map link is appropriate in other use cases. Some muppet is bound to state the obvious with that.

Though if you are using email and maps a link is sometimes ideal...

oscarBravo

beauf wrote: »

Though if you are using email and maps a link is sometimes ideal...

Best of both worlds: https://www.google.com/maps/?q=D01F5P2

beauf

I mostly use it for finding kids sports events which are often somewhere specific in parks, or unnamed pitches in the middle of nowhere. Anyway its a different use case.

PDVerse

We have around 100 separate implementations (some organisations have multiple implementations) and we processed over 50 million address lookups last year, which gives us a lot of useful data to analyse.

One interesting figure is the percentage of people who enter an Eircode rather than their address on a website (desktop and mobile) when asked for either their Eircode or Address.

I've limited the analysis to January for larger customers (at least 10k addresses to date in January) and the values vary from 21% to over 50%. I haven't analysed the data any further, and obviously regular collection and reporting would provide further insight, but it is higher than I was expecting.

beauf

PDVerse wrote: »

...people who enter an Eircode rather than their address on a website....

Be handier when they do a security check on address.

As you might enter different forms of an address and some places fail the check if you give them a variation not the exact address. But there is only Eircode. So no ambiguity.

daheff

Problem I have with Eircode is that it associates my address with the wrong town!! The town its associated with is the other end of kildare....its not even the local postal centre. Insurance companies use this for my policies now. I keep having to tell them they have the wrong town. Madness!

I contacted eircode about it and got a generalised fob off response....we dont associated the address..thats An Post

So if An Post do it....what exactly do eircode do then????

HelgaWard

daheff wrote: »

Problem I have with Eircode is that it associates my address with the wrong town!! The town its associated with is the other end of kildare....its not even the local postal centre. Insurance companies use this for my policies now. I keep having to tell them they have the wrong town. Madness!

This could possibly be down to how your insurance company has implemented eircode. If you look at the Eircode Finder website and pick a residential address for example, it will give you two address, a geographic address and a postal address. Maybe your insurance company is pulling back the postal addresses into their database when a user enters the Eircode, when they should be pulling in the Geographic Address?

daheff

HelgaWard wrote: »

This could possibly be down to how your insurance company has implemented eircode. If you look at the Eircode Finder website and pick a residential address for example, it will give you two address, a geographic address and a postal address. Maybe your insurance company is pulling back the postal addresses into their database when a user enters the Eircode, when they should be pulling in the Geographic Address?

Ill check it when i get a chance but off top of my head both are the same.