3X Software has been a Value Added Reseller of the Royal Mail Database for many years and now offers an online service under the trading name of Postcods4u. Royal Mail has developed a constantly updated database of postcode and address details, which relates to England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Channel Islands. In addition, there are over one million named organisations held. The Postal Address File (PAF) comprises a list of these addresses and their postcodes. Using a online service to lookup an address from a postcode ensures that you are using the most up to date address data and the address is captured accurately.

The basic data is supplied by Royal Mail, and, as a Value Added Reseller, 3X Software has taken that basic data and created addressing files for use on other platforms like the IBM System i (AS/400), along with software to maintain and distribute it on a periodic basis. Over 36,000 UK businesses from all sectors and of all sizes rely on PAF® These include leading Banks, Insurance Companies, Supermarkets, Government departments and the Police, online retailers, Entertainment venues, Charities and a host of Premiership Football Teams.  The database is especially useful to Financial service industries, call centers and mail order companies.

PAF is an invaluable tool for creating and maintaining mailing-lists and databases, helping you to reduce the number of returned or undelivered items, sharpen your customer profiling, and improve customer satisfaction.

With PAF you can sort your mail with full and correct Postcodes, which could help reduce your postage costs. Our system allows both postcode and address generation, depending on user requirements.

By using the system you can:

• Reduce keying time
• Standardise address formatting
• Reduce errors
• Find company addresses

Reduce delivery costs by ensuring the goods are delivered to the correct address first time

The data can bus used for:

• validating addresses
• improving response to direct mail
• efficiency of inbound call centres
• speeding-up online transactions
• mapping and geo-demographics
• credit rating.

To ease interfacing, APIs are provided which may be called to provide the following functions:

• Return an address from a given postcode
• Search on street name, with the ability to select a premise
• Translate the address from uppercase to lowercase
• Search on part of an organisation name

PAF/400 is native to the IBM System i but we can provide the data to other platforms just contact us for more details.