Draining a daily data-quality dashboard by fixing what was creating the exceptions

The problem

The play

1. 1
   Separate remediation from diagnosis, explicitly

   Every record on an exception report is two things at once: a record to fix, and evidence of an upstream automation gap. We split those jobs. The fix recipes were written down so the daily pass became deterministic instead of investigative, and the recurring patterns in what showed up became the root-cause backlog.

2. 2
   Write down the field model, because conflating it is how records get mis-fixed

   Source and tier were tracked in three parallel field families: an original/first-touch set, a most-recent/latest-touch set, and a current-value tier field with a ratchet rule, it only ever increases, so it holds the highest tier the record has ever legitimately reached.

3. 3
   Diagnose blank-source records by which side has data

   Open the record and check which family is populated. Most-recent populated and original blank means the first-touch stamp never fired, the common case, fixed by copying the correct first-touch value into the original-side fields. Neither populated means source was never stamped at all, which almost always means a human created the record.

4. 4
   Read the 'created by' field correctly, it lies in both directions

   A human name in the created-by field does not reliably mean a person typed the record into the CRM. Records created through a data-provider integration carry the human's name rather than the integration user; records built inside the sales-engagement tool push through as that tool even though a human built them.

5. 5
   Diagnose the tier-mismatch report as a race condition, not as bad data

   A lower-tier self-service form sits upstream of the demo request, you cannot request the demo through that path without completing the form first, so being top-tier on the original side is physically impossible there.

6. 6
   Find the steps missing from the client's own documentation

   The internal runbook these fixes were supposed to follow had gone stale. Two live steps were missing from it entirely, the test-address pre-step and one of the original-side fields that needs its suffix stripped.

7. 7
   Automate each report at its root cause

   Created-by user roles were aligned to their sourcing values so human-created records stamp correctly. An overnight flow now auto-corrects the tier race condition, because the fix was purely mechanical. A real-time flow corrects the tier chain when the last-response-date and most-recent-campaign-response fields misfire.

What it moved

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