AI shipment exception summaries.

What an exception summary is for

A shipment exception summary replaces the morning trawl through carrier portals and inboxes with one short note per problem consignment. It fixes nothing itself. It tells the duty coordinator which 12 of today’s 75 exceptions need a decision before 10am, and why. It covers late or failed deliveries, damage notes, short shipments, misroutes and imports waiting on Customs clearance.

The workflow at a glance

Inputs

Carrier tracking events, forwarder and customs broker emails, driver notes and photos, and the booking record (customer, promised date, declared value, carriage terms).

Systems

Your TMS or WMS (or Cin7 for distributors), the shared operations inbox, carrier tracking APIs, and the team channel where the board is posted.

Steps

Group events and messages by consignment number; classify the exception; pull the promise date and value; work out the applicable clock; write a three-line summary with a suggested next action; rank by deadline and impact.

Human review

The duty coordinator works the ranked list at fixed times (say 7.30am and 1pm), accepts or edits each next action, and owns every customer message, re-delivery and claim.

Outputs

A ranked exception board, one summary per consignment written back to the TMS, and draft customer updates awaiting approval.

Measures

Minutes from first event to summary, exceptions with a named owner by 10am, storage charges on held imports, claims lodged inside the notice period, and edits per summary.

Risks

Two consignments merged into one summary, emails that never reach the shared inbox, an unsupported cause, and stale tracking data shown as current.

Illustrative worked example

Illustrative example: an Auckland 3PL moving 1,800 consignments a week through three domestic carriers. Assumptions: 4% raise an exception (72), plus three held imports, so 75 a week. A coordinator spends about 9 minutes on each, opening portals and threads and writing an update. All figures are synthetic.

The net saving is about 7 coordinator hours a week. Tokens at Claude Sonnet 5.5 list prices of US$2 per million input and US$10 per million output (as listed on 19 October 2026) come to roughly US$1.60 a week. The money that matters is elsewhere: one held import noticed a day earlier, or one damage claim lodged in time, is worth more than a year of tokens.

Which New Zealand rules set the clocks

Two sets of deadlines drive the ranking, and each summary states the relevant one in plain words.

Imports waiting on clearance. New Zealand Customs says an import entry must be completed within 20 days of arrival, goods sit in freight or postal storage until cleared, and most locations give three to four free days before charging. Customs is not responsible for storage (demurrage) fees caused by delayed clearance, and couriers often return goods after 20 days. Each held import carries a day count since arrival.

Damage and partial loss in domestic carriage. Under the Contract and Commercial Law Act 2017, a claim against a contracting carrier for damage or partial loss needs written notice within 30 days after the carrier’s responsibility ends (section 274). A contracting carrier that subcontracted the job must notify the actual carrier within 10 days of receiving that notice (section 275), which matters for 3PLs and forwarders. A contract that does not state its type is at limited carrier’s risk (section 249), capped at $2,000 per unit of goods (section 259). When a unit’s declared value exceeds the cap, the summary says so, because recovery may need cargo insurance. Contract terms can change some of this; take advice on large claims.

What the coordinator still decides

The AI drafts; the coordinator decides:

• Whether to re-deliver, return to sender, hold or re-route.
• What the customer is told and when, using the approval path in our customer delivery enquiry handling workflow.
• Whether to lodge a claim, against which carrier, and for how much.
• Any statement of cause. “Depot scan at 14:02 says damaged” is a fact the summary can quote; “the carrier was careless” is a judgement it must not make.
• Anything that costs money: expedited freight, storage, re-delivery fees.

Where exception summaries go wrong

Most failures come from grouping and freshness, not from the model’s writing.

How to start, and what drives cost

1. Collect four weeks of history. Exceptions, the emails behind them and what the team actually did.
2. Agree types and clocks. Exception categories, customer service levels, the Customs storage window and the 30-day notice period.
3. Run in shadow for two weeks. Summaries sit beside the current process; log edits and misses in a human review queue.
4. Go live narrowly. One carrier or one key customer first.

Cost is driven by the number of carrier integrations, whether your TMS or Cin7 account has an API, inbox routing, and review time. Damage exceptions are only as good as their evidence, so pair this with proof of delivery extraction. See AI for logistics in New Zealand for the sector view and AI workflow automation for build options.

Written by the Levy Street team in Wellington. Last updated 19 October 2026.