The Resolution Layer · Case Study in BriefEKOM
An industrial hose & belting distributor.
A cold read of a distributor's catalog where nobody is comparing two objects they can see — they are comparing a pressure rating, a ply count and an inside diameter. One of a set of anonymized EKOM analyses — what surfaced, and where it leads.
Lead finding · specification integrity
An FDA food-transfer hose states two working pressures, 100 PSI apart, on the same page.
The product description reads 150 PSI FDA SUCTION/TRANSFER HOSE; the page's own meta description says 250 PSI. The rating a buyer reads depends on which part of the page they happen to read. On an industrial catalog the specification is the product — and a contradiction like this does not cost a sale, it costs the wrong sale. The same shape recurs across the catalog: reinforced rubber sheet whose name and URL disagree on ply count, the spec that sets load capacity, and disagree in both directions.
Also surfaced
A field named in feet, storing inches
Short assemblies named 24 IN OAL carry assembly_length_ft=24 FT — a twelve-fold error in the one field a length filter reads. The same field elsewhere holds genuine inch values and elsewhere a correct value in feet, so the unit is recoverable from neither the number nor the label.
Every product publishes its part number as a global barcode
100% of the catalog carries its own part number in the gtin8 field. A GTIN-8 is an eight-digit GS1 number; only 370 of 35,852 values are even eight characters of digits. Every shopping engine, marketplace and EDI partner that validates against GS1 is reading a fabricated identifier.
12.6% of published product URLs return nothing
5,164 of 41,024 advertised addresses are dead. One product line accounts for over half of them: two-thirds of its URLs 404, and the 1,442 survivors are in stock and purchasable with no description on any page.
An instruction not to buy, serving as a product name
A priced, in-stock rubber sheet is named Do not use-See [part no.] — and the replacement it names is not in the catalog. Another, at $181.08, is named non-stock. Elsewhere: Item Merged. See Extended Description. and OBSOLETE PART--DO NOT USE--.
How EKOM read it. The engine took the live public catalog cold — no file, no credentials, no schema — profiled the catalog's vertical and field semantics on its own, then read every record against its siblings and against how each field was used catalog-wide. That context is what turns a valid-looking string into a finding: a sibling naming the same series correctly, a unit label with nothing converting to it, a barcode field holding something that is not a barcode.
From diagnosis to channel-ready. The 120 findings collapse into six upstream mechanisms — a character limit, a unit label without a conversion, internal status text in the name field, a numeric column in the wrong place, a default used as a value, and two sources with no referee. Fixing the findings fixes the findings; fixing the mechanisms fixes every product that has already passed through them and every product that will. Then the same intelligence holds the line at intake, so the next unit mismatch never reaches a live page.