What is Delivery exception?
Any delivery that does not complete as planned — nobody home, no access, refused, damaged, wrong address — recorded with a reason rather than left ambiguous.
An exception is not a failure of record-keeping; it is the record. The delivery did not complete, and the useful question is why, because the reason determines what happens next and what you should fix.
Operations that record exceptions as a single “failed” status learn nothing from them. Operations that record a reason — nobody home, no safe place, access refused, address not found, customer refused, item damaged — end up with a ranked list of causes, and the top one is almost always fixable systematically rather than case by case.
The most common mistake is treating exceptions as noise to be excluded from reporting. An on-time rate that quietly drops exceptions is measuring the deliveries that went well, which nobody needed measured.
In PrivateMile: a driver who cannot complete a stop records a reason and a photo, the order stays visible on the board rather than disappearing, and exception reasons are reported so the recurring ones become obvious.