← Closing the loop on data quality

Bringing suppliers into the correction workflow

Part of the Validation case study: sharing selected results with suppliers, so they can prepare and submit corrections within Quantemplate.

Problem

Clients were downloading failed rows and emailing them to suppliers to request corrections. We extended the correction workflow through Feeds, so clients could share selected validation results and suppliers could prepare and submit corrections within Quantemplate. This has now shipped in a limited beta.

Results were siloed in Quantemplate Clients wanted an easier way to share results with suppliers Evidence

When we spoke to clients at the management level, they wanted to play their validation reports back to their suppliers, to inform them of their data quality performance. Currently they did this by downloading failed rows and emailing them, which was a slow process. We spotted an opportunity for value-add here: show suppliers validation results and ask them for corrections.

Evidence
  • Clients’ management-level users had objectives to improve the quality coming from their suppliers.
  • IT teams asked for an API to access validation results, to build their own feedback rig.

Approach

Framing · Strategic decision

Client feedback

‘Give us an API so we can build our own validation feedback rig’

Strategic decision

Bringing the feedback workflow into Quantemplate would let business users request and manage supplier corrections without needing their IT team to build and maintain a separate system. It would also keep results and corrections connected in one auditable workflow, increasing the product’s value and supporting retention.

Design decisions

Correction requests workflow between organisations
Sharing setup: the user selects which submission to share to and which rules to share. Beta deployment.
Choose what to share Select the results, organisations and people Evidence

Clients select the validation results, organisations and people to include, then review the selection before sharing.

Evidence

Clients told us they wanted to share their results but were concerned about sharing proprietary data. We addressed this by allowing them to select specific rules to share.

The sharing popup: ‘Share with 2 partners’, listing each partner organisation with its submitters and the validation results selected to share, with a Review sharing button.
Corrections sharing popup: the user can select which rules to share, which organisations and users to share with.
The corrections request email: who shared the validation results, each rule with its count of failing rows and where they are, and a View corrections button linking straight to them.
Sharing request email contains a full breakdown of the failed rows, and a link to go straight to them.
Submit only when ready Prepare corrections privately, then submit Design exploration

I separated preparing corrections from submitting them. A ‘Corrections pending’ indicator makes the outstanding changes visible, with an explicit Submit action to pass them back when ready.

Corrections pending Submit
Interaction mockup: pending corrections stay with the supplier until explicitly submitted.
Design exploration

Exploring the handoff revealed a risk: sending every edit immediately could expose unfinished corrections to the receiver and trigger pipeline runs. I separated preparation from submission, giving suppliers time to check their changes before passing them back.

Give both parties the same measure of progress Track only the validations that were shared Design exploration

A supplier may only be asked to address some of a dataset’s validations. Measuring progress across the entire dataset could include validations they weren’t asked to correct. I chose to measure progress against the shared validations, so requester and supplier would see the same percentage and have a consistent understanding of what remained.

A data submission with a corrections request attached: requested by and last edit submitted, each with the organisation and person, and a progress bar showing 63% corrected.
Correction requests are attached to the submitted data and visible to both parties.
Design exploration

Not every failure needed correcting, so I explored tracking only checks users had started working on. But starting another check added all its failures to the total, making progress appear to drop.

I kept it simple: show how many corrections had been requested and how many were complete.

Two notifications: validations ready to share with a partner organisation, and a progress bar on the sent validations showing '10 results, 88% corrected'.
The progress bar tracks completion of the shared validations specifically, not the full dataset, so requester and supplier see the same number.

Outcome

Supplier sharing is now in limited beta; we don’t yet have usage results or client feedback.

Back to the Validation case study