Assigning each hold, rejection or failure to one cause by a stated rule, so the split by cause has an owner per row.
Cause attribution is the rule that maps each failed row to one cause: a customs hold to customer data, broker entry or authority selection; a rejected claim to coding, eligibility or payer; a late delivery to warehouse, carrier or customer. The rule is written once, usually from a field such as the correction source or the reason code, and applied to every row the same way. A cause split without a stated rule is one person's opinion per row.
A written rule maps each failed row to exactly one cause, usually from a reason code or the correction source, and is applied the same way to every row. The split by cause then has an owner for each line.
Ninety late deliveries: 41 stock-outs, 18 warehouse picks, 15 carrier, 9 customer dates never agreed, 7 order errors. Planning owns the largest line, not the warehouse that was being blamed.
Cause chosen by whoever closes the record. The most convenient cause wins, and it is usually somebody else.