What the documents look like
After-sales repair and reship work aims to restore a product to usable condition, and the case is not normally closed by a direct refund. Contract and transaction material comparison therefore has to handle four document types at the same time: repair requests, reship orders, inspection reports, and accessory outbound orders. These materials come from the after-sales system, the order system, repair outlets, and the accessory warehouse WMS, and updates can occur per order and daily. Deciding between repair and reship, coordinating accessories, and following up on customer confirmation are the three most time-consuming steps. Comparison has to keep the citation source traceable to the specific material text, or repeated complaints and uncontrolled accessory cost become hard to locate.
A repair request records the customer submission, the object under repair, and the fault description. An inspection report records the outlet conclusion and the recommended action. A reship order records the requested replacement. An accessory outbound order records the warehouse action and its status. These four documents can disagree on the object, the conclusion, or the stage, and the comparison task is to keep each cited statement attached to the material that supports it.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
The knowledge base search node outputs citations as an array, and the length may be zero. Even when no content is found, that output path still runs through. Citation content is handed to the answering step for line-by-line comparison against the source text. The minimum relevance value is a filter threshold and takes effect only under semantic retrieval or when result reranking is used; it does not perform permission or entity isolation. Knowledge bases can be associated together only when they share the same vector model, and that requirement does not extend to business registry sites or other external systems. Material timeliness checks use the current version and a historical version of the document as test sources, and whether a citation is adopted still depends on review against the valid version.
Hypothetical exercise sample: a brand after-sales ticket records that on 10 March 2025 the customer submitted a repair request for a model A complete unit, with the fault described as a burnt mainboard. On 12 March the repair outlet issued an inspection report whose conclusion reads "mainboard damaged, recommend reshipping the mainboard and arranging outlet replacement." On 13 March the accessory warehouse WMS generated an accessory outbound order for 1 item with status "outbound." A draft sentence awaiting judgment reads: "The inspection report has confirmed the complete unit is scrapped; agree to reship a new unit." The draft sentence disagrees with the inspection report source text on the object and conclusion fields and is an unsupported statement that cannot serve as a handover basis.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting point for this exercise | Reason for the choice and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | After-sales repair and reship material library | Check the selected knowledge base and material version, and confirm the vector model identifier matches before associating |
| Search mode | Hybrid retrieval | Number and model queries rely on full-text recall, natural language descriptions rely on semantic recall, and the two are merged through RRF |
| Minimum relevance | Hypothetical starting value 0.3 | Compare with 0.5 and observe whether citation content covers the inspection report source text; this value is a starting point for this exercise, not an official default |
| Citation limit | Hypothetical starting value 2000 tokens | Compare with 1000 tokens and observe whether the reship order and outbound order are cited in full |
| Result reranking | Enabled | When candidates are numerous, filter by rerank score; reranking requires a model and is enabled according to settings |
| Citation output | Array format, zero length allowed | Use a paper input of [] to check the downstream handling design, without claiming that a fictional rule search will necessarily return [] |
Three common errors
- Treating minimum relevance as a permission or entity filter. The input is a retrieval request for one customer ticket, the comparison object is the minimum relevance setting against returned citations, and the observation is whether other customers or unauthorized records appear in the result. A relevance score does not perform isolation, and any unauthorized record that appears must be recorded as a configuration gap.
- Treating retrieval output as authorized execution. The input is an accessory outbound order citation, the comparison object is the outbound order status against a handover request, and the observation is whether "outbound" is taken as reship approval. An outbound order records a warehouse action, and reship approval requires a separate downstream implementation.
- Treating a pending-review state as a negative conclusion. The input is the review status field of a repair request, the comparison object is the "has confirmed" wording in the draft sentence, and the observation is whether both refer to the same subject, the same period, and the same field. When the field is not stated, or only evidence of a related stage exists, the item must be recorded as pending verification and cannot be written as a conflict or a negation.
How to verify the setup
- Input the inspection report source text from the hypothetical sample and the draft sentence "The inspection report has confirmed the complete unit is scrapped; agree to reship a new unit." Compare the report conclusion field "mainboard damaged, recommend reshipping the mainboard" against "complete unit is scrapped" in the draft sentence. The observed result is that the draft sentence disagrees with the source on the object and the conclusion, and it is judged unsupported.
- Input the accessory outbound order from the hypothetical sample. Compare the outbound order status "outbound" against "reship approved" in the handover request. The observed result is that the outbound order does not state an approval field, and the item is judged pending verification, with the evidence gap retained.
- Input a paper retrieval result of []. Compare it against the downstream answering step's handling design. The observed result is that the output path runs through without error, confirming that an empty citation can be handled downstream. This check does not claim that a fictional rule search will necessarily return []; it verifies only the handling behavior for an empty array.