A route plan is a promise about tomorrow. Quality is how often that promise survives contact with the day.
Why it matters
Most operations measure routes before they are driven — stop counts, miles, a tidy-looking map. That tells you how the plan looks, not whether it works. A route can be geographically perfect and still fail because it holds three exact-time commitments in the same hour, or because the last two stops need a licence the technician does not have.
How you notice it slipping
The gap between planned and actual grows. Technicians finish 40 minutes late on Tuesdays, every Tuesday. Dispatch rebuilds the same route by hand each morning. Nobody trusts the plan enough to follow it, so everyone drives their own version — and then the plan is not wrong, it is simply not used.
What to do
Judge a route after it ran. Compare planned finish against actual finish, planned stops against completed stops, and count how many stops moved after the route was locked. Three numbers, once a week, per route. Where the gap is widest, look upstream: a route rarely fails for the reason it appears to fail on the day.