Practical International Data Management - Company name
Company names, like personal names, are important to the customer, and can be created and written highly creatively and with great variation. Company names in some countries (such as Germany) commonly contain the name of the owner. Descriptors of the company's activities (such as "Baker" or "Bookshop" may be written in different places depending on language and/or culture.
Strive to collect company name data correctly at the data entry stage - they cannot be corrected to any extent at a later stage without further dialogue with the customer.
Avoid processing or "correcting" company names after collection, except for constants within names such as the company legal type (Ltd, PLC, SA, GmbH, Inc. etc.), conjunctions ("and", "&", "+") and articles ("the", "a", "an").
Do not strip out the company legal type indicator ((Ltd, PLC, SA, GmbH, Inc. etc.) without noting where is belongs in the company name string, as it may be written in different places in different languages and company names, and needs to be put back in the correct position for use.
Company names often contain acronyms and abbreviations. If these are to be written without punctuation it makes it more imperitive that the name is correctly collected and stored at the data collection stage and not processed at a later stage, and processes such as changin casing will fail when an acronym or abbreviation cannot be recognised as such by the use of punctuation.
Company names can be very long. Ensure that the length of field is at least 150 to collect all names without truncation.
Resources
Legal Forms from Hell Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen looks at the effect company legal forms have on data matching, October 2010. (Cached version)
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