Location and site
The physical place where something is sold, made, stored or served, and its place in an operational and commercial hierarchy.
01 Why it matters
What depends on getting this right
Almost every operational comparison is like-for-like by site, and almost every site master is maintained separately in four systems with different codes, opening dates and groupings.
02 Where it lives
Every system holds a different version
None of these is wrong. Each was built for a purpose and records the part of the entity that purpose needed, which is exactly why resolution is required rather than optional.
| System | What it holds of this entity |
|---|---|
| ERP | plant, storage location and ship-to party |
| POS or store systems | the trading location and its calendar |
| WMS | the physical warehouse and its bins |
| HR and rostering | the place people are assigned to work |
| Property or CAFM | the lease, the estate record and the service obligation |
03 Match keys
What actually matches, and what only looks like it does
| Key | How well it works |
|---|---|
| Geocode plus normalised address | Strong, and the only key that survives renaming. |
| Internal site code | Reliable within a system, inconsistent across them. |
| Legal entity plus address | Distinguishes co-located operations of different companies. |
| Opening and closing dates | Not a key, but essential for like-for-like comparison. |
04 Survivorship
When two records disagree, which value wins
Survivorship is a business decision, not a technical default. These rules should be agreed with the people who own the data and then applied consistently, because changing them later restates history.
Address and geocode from the authoritative property record
Not from a delivery note or a user-entered field.
Trading calendar from the operational system
Opening hours and business date rules belong to the operation, not to finance.
Hierarchy is effective-dated
Region and cluster assignments change; comparisons need the structure as it was.
Retain closed sites
They are required for history and for like-for-like exclusions.
05 The cost of not doing it
What stays broken while it is unresolved
Like-for-like that is not like for like
New, closed and refitted sites included inconsistently make the headline growth number meaningless.
Performance compared across incomparable formats
Without size, format and catchment attributes, site ranking measures the estate rather than the management.
Cost allocated to the wrong place
Shared sites and co-located operations distort every per-site cost line.
Service coverage misjudged
Response times and travel cost depend on geography that only geocoding provides.
06 Metrics that divide by it
The numbers this entity carries
07 Questions
Frequently asked
What attributes make site comparison fair?
Format, size, opening date, catchment and refit history. Without them, a site league table mostly ranks the estate the business inherited rather than the performance of the people running it.
How should closed sites be handled?
Kept, flagged and excluded explicitly from like-for-like. Deleting them makes history unreproducible; including them silently makes growth look worse than it is.
See the duplicates in your own data
We will resolve one entity on your systems, live, and show what the duplicates are costing.