Key takeaway
Evaluate completeness, consistency and provenance for a defined buyer use. An impressive file count can conceal weak evidence.
Define what a good record means.
Choose a unit of work and a proposed use. For a repair history, a useful record may connect the reported issue, action and verified completion. For a support archive, “closed” may need interpretation. Document the difference between a recorded status and a confirmed outcome.
Measure a bounded category internally.
Use your approved internal environment to understand quality before any external sample. Track the denominator as well as the defect: 200 incomplete records out of 1,000 reviewed means something different from 200 across an unknown archive. This website does not receive or inspect those records.
| Dimension | Evidence to prepare |
|---|---|
| Completeness | Presence of required workflow fields |
| Consistency | Status and category meanings across periods |
| Duplicates | Repeated events versus legitimate follow-ups |
| Continuity | Links between stages and migration gaps |
| Provenance | Creators, sources and transformations |
| Outcome | Resolved, unresolved and unverified distinctions |
Do not clean away the important exceptions.
Failed repairs, callbacks and escalations may be informative when labeled correctly. Removing every unusual case can distort the workflow. Keep a transformation log explaining why records were removed, changed or generalized, then test whether the remaining package still answers the intended question.
Document uncertainty rather than inventing precision.
If a field is missing, preserve that fact instead of generating a plausible replacement and treating it as observed. Separate machine-generated summaries from source notes. A buyer should be able to distinguish recorded events, human annotations and later transformations.
Agree on acceptance before expensive cleanup.
Ask which defects cause rejection, which are tolerable and how partial acceptance affects economics. Set a preparation budget based on that answer. A company can spend heavily producing a tidy package that still does not fit a buyer’s purpose. Use a readiness plan to resolve the most consequential gaps first.