What the documents look like
Price and display audits take place during ordinary trading periods, where the central concern is continued execution of a standard. This differs from franchise training and opening coaching, which are one-time deliveries at the start of a relationship. The main data sources are the supervision system, POS price lists, store cameras and the head office promotion calendar, refreshed weekly or monthly. The documents handled day to day are store visit photographs, price tag lists, display standards and rectification notices. When inventory procurement and supplier material enters this chain, it usually arrives as an attachment to a store visit record, a supplier quotation, a purchase request or a handover note. Each item must be checked for a traceable citation source, a valid version and a clear authorization state. The most time-consuming steps are checking price tags, capturing photographic evidence and tracking the rectification loop to closure. Citation tracing determines whether these steps can form a reviewable evidence chain.
For the citation tracing step, three industry facts matter most. First, the audit happens in the operating period, so material may describe a state that is proposed rather than completed. Second, the documents are short operational artifacts such as quotations and notices, so a single field often carries a narrow meaning. Third, the update cadence is weekly or monthly, so a document version and its effective range must be read together.
Constraints at the citation tracing step
Citation tracing requires that every cited item can be located to a specific document, a specific field and a specific effective range. The knowledge base search node outputs a citation content array, and the array length may be zero. An empty array does not mean the workflow has errored or stopped. Retrieval only recalls candidate content; it does not perform authorization judgment. The minimum relevance value is a filtering threshold and does not constitute a permission or entity isolation rule. Knowledge bases that use different vector models cannot be associated together, so the vector model identifier must be checked first and non-matching bases excluded.
Hypothetical paper exercise sample: a regional supervisor in a chain operations department submits a handover request during a store visit in the second week of March 2025. The material to be checked reads as follows. "Supplier A quotation (number S-2025-031) states the unit price of a certain display rack model, valid until 31 March 2025." "Store visit photograph P-0312 shows the store end-cap display matching the head office March 2025 promotion calendar image." "Rectification notice R-008 requires the price tag replacement to be completed by 20 March." The draft sentence to be judged is: "The store has completed procurement according to the supplier quotation and executed the rectification." This sentence asserts two facts, procurement completion and rectification completion. The material provides only a quotation validity period, a photographic comparison and a rectification requirement. No purchase order, acceptance record or rectification completion confirmation is provided, so the judgment is pending verification.
Configuration and implementation checks
| Configuration item | Hypothetical starting value for this exercise | Reason and comparison method |
|---|---|---|
| Associated knowledge bases | Select the store visit material base and the supplier material base that share one vector model | Check that the vector model identifiers match before associating them; exclude any base whose identifier does not match |
| Search mode | Hybrid search | Price tag numbers and supplier numbers suit full-text search, while natural language descriptions suit semantic search; compare recall differences between the two query types |
| Citation limit | Hypothetical starting value of 800 tokens | Set from the typical length of store visit photograph notes and quotation summaries; compare citation completeness against 500 and 1200 |
| Minimum relevance | Hypothetical starting value of 0.4 | Compare against 0.3 and 0.5 to observe whether low-relevance fragments are filtered; this is not treated as a permission filter |
| Question optimization | Enabled for multi-turn follow-up scenarios | Compare against the disabled state for continuous dialogue retrieval; a single clear question can leave it disabled |
| Result rerank | Enabled when candidates are numerous | Compare against the disabled state for ranking stability; a rerank model must be available and enabled in settings |
Three common errors
- Treating a quotation validity period as a supply period or as proof of procurement execution. The input is supplier A quotation S-2025-031. The compared field is "valid until 31 March 2025". The observable result is that this field constrains only how long the quotation remains valid; it does not indicate that a purchase order has been raised or that supply has been completed.
- Treating a store visit photograph comparison as rectification completion confirmation. The input is photograph P-0312 and the promotion calendar image. The compared object is display consistency. The observable result is that the photograph supports a judgment about display state; it does not constitute closure confirmation for rectification notice R-008.
- Treating a retrieval recall result as an authorization basis. The input is the citation array returned by the knowledge base search. The compared object is the citation content against the original document. The observable result is that the citation array length may be zero, and recalled content does not indicate that an operation has been authorized or an approval has passed.
How to verify the setup
- Compare the quotation text S-2025-031 from the hypothetical sample against the draft sentence "The store has completed procurement according to the supplier quotation and executed the rectification." The input is the quotation validity field and the procurement completion assertion in the draft sentence. Compare whether both share the same subject, the same period and the same field. If the quotation states no purchase order number or acceptance record, the judgment is unsupported, and the evidence gap must be recorded.
- Compare store visit photograph P-0312 against rectification notice R-008. The input is the photograph display comparison result and the rectification requirement. Compare whether the photograph covers every rectification item listed in the notice. If the photograph shows only the end-cap display and does not cover the price tag replacement item, the judgment is partial evidence, and rectification closure remains pending verification.
- Use the citation array output by the knowledge base search node for a downstream check. The input is the citation content array returned by retrieval. Compare whether the downstream answer step corresponds item by item to the cited original text. If the array length is zero, check whether the downstream design handles the empty-result branch; do not claim that a fabricated rule search necessarily returns an empty array.