Workflow Sample: Episode 508: Officialize Corporate Names in "Customer Master" by Corporate Number API

"Enter the official company name!"

You should manage suppliers or customers in "Master file". However, even if you keep saying "Register the official company name!" there will be differences such as

Upper case or lower case letter
Double byte or single byte character
Space in between or not

Since October 2015, Japanese government (National Tax Agency) has allocated "Corporate Number" to each and every enterprise in Japan. There, "official company names" (trade names), etc. are strictly managed. And Web-API that can be used free of charge has also been operating. That is almost an "infrastructure", so you have no choice not to use it.

The following Workflow is a scheme of automatic appending of "Customer code" and "Customer name" to SpreadSheet, by entering new customer information. Although it takes a little labor, "official company names" are secured by entering "Corporate number". It has a very significant meaning that it will relieve you from "name-based aggregation" and "data cleaning".

Yes, it will keep "big data" from being ended up in being "big noise-data".

[Customer Master Appending]

As of November 2016, "Corporate Number API" provides only two types of services as follows. (Name retrieval is not included in the API)

Retrieve information by specifying Corporate number
Retrieve information by specifying the registration period

Also, Response format is limited to the following. (json response is not included)

CSV/Shift-JIS
CSV/Unicode(UTF-8)
XML/Unicode(UTF-8)

Even so, my impression about its "service level" in actual use is pretty good. Regarding its production environment, except twice of planned outage, regularly it is quite stable to be used. (I didn't expect too much for a "service by the Government", but it's cool.)

2016-03-19(Sat) 02:00 ～ 20(Sun) 24:00
2016-06-04(Sat) 09:30 ～ 05(Sun) 24:00 (Disconnection up to 8 times)
2016-11-18(Fri) 21:00 ～ 20(Sun) 13:00 [Planned]

I should keep my ear to the ground to catch the trend of service expansion and peripheral services, henceforward.

P.S.
By the way, even though it has been a long time since trade name registration in alphabets is permitted, letters of the registered official trade name are Double-byte. Many people are discouraged, thinking that the Government should not convert the name to double-byte, despite it was capable of corresponding with global business. The Ministry of Justice should consider "registration in English" more seriously.