If you are rating outside of the area covered by your specific distance engine, then the system can be defined to estimate a distance using geographic codes, or geocodes.
A geocode (geographic code) is way of specifying a location using longitude and latitude coordinates. It is useful if regular distance information based on a street address or postal code is not available. They are used extensively in calculating international distances.
Geocode information appears in the following entities:
You can establish whether geocodes are mandatory for each country. You can also use a distance engine to derive geocodes. The distance engine attempts to assign a latitude and longitude to each entity and transactional address in a country.
You can set up a default latitude and longitude value for each country. If your distance engine fails to provide a latitude and longitude for an address, then these default country values are used. Note that you can override the system generated values if necessary.