What is Exception Management?

Exception management is the operational discipline of identifying, prioritizing, and resolving situations that fall outside normal processing flows. In e-commerce operations, exceptions include inventory discrepancies, payment failures, address validation errors, backorder situations, carrier delivery failures, return disputes, and any other scenario where the standard automated workflow cannot complete without human intervention.

Why It Matters

Every exception that is not resolved promptly becomes a customer experience failure. A payment exception that sits in a queue for two days means a customer waiting two days for their order to process. An address exception that is ignored means a package returned to sender. Efficient exception management minimizes the customer impact of operational anomalies and prevents small issues from cascading into larger problems.

How It Works

• Detection: Systems automatically flag transactions that fail validation rules, trigger error conditions, or deviate from expected patterns.
• Classification: Exceptions are categorized by type and severity. Critical exceptions (potential fraud, hazmat issues) need immediate attention; minor exceptions (slight address formatting) can be auto-resolved or batched for review.
• Assignment: Exceptions are routed to the appropriate team member based on type, expertise requirements, and workload balancing.
• Resolution: The handler investigates the exception, determines the appropriate action, and resolves it—either fixing the issue and allowing normal processing to continue, or escalating to a supervisor.
• Prevention: Track exception patterns to identify systemic causes. If 5% of orders trigger address exceptions, the address validation step needs improvement.

How Nventory Helps

Nventory provides a centralized exception management dashboard that surfaces all operational anomalies across channels and warehouses, categorized by type and priority. The system auto-resolves common exceptions where possible, routes complex ones to the right team members, and tracks exception trends to help you address root causes and reduce exception volume over time.