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Case Study

Designing for Exceptions Instead of Hoping Them Away

A case study on shifting from brittle straight-through-processing goals to a system that treated exceptions as first-class operational objects.

2026-02-055 min readCase Studies

Key line

Straight-through processing only matters when the exceptions stop poisoning the rest of the flow.

Section

The mistake

The team optimized for a happy path that covered most cases numerically, but the remaining exceptions consumed disproportionate attention and routinely broke service expectations.

Section

The fix

Tenops reworked the system around explicit exception classes, operator guidance, and a better split between automated preparation and human judgment.

Next step

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