Percent of unique locations get well playbook

[Cheshire Cat]

In the following playbook: https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0832200

It states:

Note: there might be duplicate names that are false positives. This can occur when a location name is a common suite, branch or some other value, but is in different geographic location. This is not a good naming standard to have, and you should consider updating your locations to be better uniquely identified.

As their screenshot above shows, I would think this is a common issue for most medium and large sized companies.  What are some methods you have used to make your locations more uniquely identified? We have building codes, and am considering making the floor & room location = building_code + "-" Name.  Not 100% sold because this seems to duplicate the Full Name.  Grateful for any thoughts or suggestions.

[s4scott]

This is tricky as you have to balance what the users will recognize with the "uniqueness" you need. For example if you have a campus, with multiple buildings, each with multiple floors you could end up with locations longer that 'War and Peace' (that is a really long novel in case you didn't go to secondary school in the U.S.), and no user is going to wade through all of that to pick the right Suite on the right Floor of the right... you get the idea.

I personally think it is absurd to expect location name values to be unique. It is like expecting all user first names to be unique, just not realistic.

If you can require the selection of the parent location to drill into the lower levels, then my recommendation would be to side with the user and don't create cryptic and unique location names. If you use a Location number or ID value, you could use that as a suffix or prefix to make lookup easy.