Resolve Conflicting Values

An enrichment provider returns a job title and company size for a Ferrow Industrial contact. Both conflict with values a rep entered by hand the previous week. The enrichment job, running on its nightly schedule, is about to overwrite both, because “newest data wins” was never actually decided as a policy. It just became the default behavior nobody chose.

Freshness of the write isn't freshness of the fact

A value's freshness as a write isn't the same as the freshness of the underlying fact. Classify every field family in advance, using the same source/authority/freshness vocabulary the field dictionary already defines: a practitioner-owned assessment is never silently overwritten; a system-derived, recalculable field refreshes when its source recalculates; a provider-sourced firmographic field refreshes on verified higher freshness; an empty field fills automatically.

A conflict that stays, and a merge that stops

The Ferrow Industrial contact's job title is practitioner-owned-adjacent, so it is never silently overwritten, while company size is provider-sourced-by-default and refreshes automatically. The provider-conflict-pair fixture confirms the job title routes to review with both values shown while company size refreshes on its own. The same never-silent rule applies to a merge involving a protected record: the Priya Shah / Rina Fields merge from Chapter 3 stays blocked here too, for the same reason.

Carry this into your business

Decide the overwrite rule for each field family before an enrichment job forces the decision at 2 a.m. on a schedule nobody's watching. “Newest wins” isn't a policy. It's what happens by default when nobody wrote one down.