Peak Survival: How Supply Chain Leaders Are Breaking the Panic Cycle

The old peak season playbook is dead. If you're still hiring 500 percent more temp workers, scrambling to find missing orders, building custom integrations for quick-fixes, or crossing your fingers that your fulfillment systems hold up, you're already behind.

New research tells a stark story: 84 percent of leaders are confident in their upcoming season. Contrast that with the 28-point reality gap we saw in 2024, when 70 percent entered peak season confident, but only 42 percent delivered. That performance gap cost companies millions in overtime, shipping overruns, and lost customers. Leaders aren't playing the same game.

Margin Impact of a Crisis Mindset

Heightened confidence despite cost pressures signals a new mindset: crisis management isn’t working. Technology that drives long-term margin protection is the new growth lever.

Leaders reject the premise that peak season chaos is an inevitable natural disaster on margins. They’re operating from a different strategic framework built on connected, artificial intelligence-enabled technologies that help them anticipate performance gaps and profit threats rather than merely responding to fires.

Gordon Companies exemplifies this, going from manually processing orders across five warehouses with four-day fulfillment times to next-day fulfillment and onboarding seasonal staff in just 30 minutes.

Every "emergency" solution from last peak season represents a systemic weakness that will resurface until you address the root cause. Audit these temporary fixes now; they reveal exactly where your operation will break when volume surges.

Why Piecemeal Tech is Your Biggest Risk

Last year’s data showed organizations investing in flashy, often standalone solutions, like AI (51 percent) and automated guidance vehicles (42 percent), which can lack a flexible tech foundation to support them effectively. This year, the trend is more farsighted with system upgrades for visibility (28 percent) and practical automation integration (26 percent) taking priority, and for good reason.

AI experiments and new automated systems create new failure points without a scalable integration approach. Adding new solutions to combat external economic factors makes sense, but you must understand the technical debt you’ll run into.

When systems can’t communicate during peak stress, you’re managing multiple data sets instead of one unified operation. In addition, while some platform partners may promote "standard" integrations, it’s critical to consider what this means for you and your business. What new integration layers will you need to build? Do these new solutions create extensive manual work once in place?

Leaders are opting for integrated platforms that eliminate gaps between systems. Map every handoff between your systems; each manual step or data translation is where your peak season may fracture. Comprehensive pre-built integrations deliver the most confidence, flexibility, operational visibility, and control.

Turn Your Workforce Into Your Competitive Weapon

Labor continues to hinder growth, but leaders are adopting more resilient approaches. Eighty-eight percent of workers are cross-trained to prepare for peak demand, building operational intelligence that scales. Meanwhile, 87 percent of businesses are prioritizing earlier seasonal hiring, allowing time to build competency before the surge hits.

Breaking the panic cycle requires creating teams that adapt to challenges you haven't anticipated yet. An easy-to-learn platform is key to this success.

Your permanent workforce must be capable of training and managing temporary staff in hours, not days. Your platform should enable this rapid scaling, not fight it. Test its ability to onboard new workers in 30 minutes. If it takes longer than half a day, you may spend peak season training instead of fulfilling.

Make Costs Your Strategic Advantage, Not Your Victim

Facing tariffs and other uncertainties, 92 percent of leaders realize that absorbing costs to maintain pricing is unsustainable. Seventy-six percent are implementing selective price increases and 70 percent are using dynamic pricing, signaling more strategic profitability. Only 8 percent of organizations still absorb costs to maintain pricing.

Preserving regular margins during peak will require a deeper level of supply chain intelligence that enables optimizing different margin structures across customer segments and order types. Identify which orders and customers remain profitable during peak season stress and build pricing strategies that guide volume toward your operational strengths.

The New Peak Competitive Advantage

Two-thirds of leaders expect better margins in peak 2025 despite challenging market conditions and cost pressures. They're building operations that thrive on complexity, not just survive it.

Transformation extends beyond seasonal preparation, establishing a new paradigm for supply chain leadership. The survival strategy is now about creating operations that proactively reduce costs, unlock new revenue streams, drive rapid innovation, and create repeatable customer experiences.

The next 30 days determine whether you'll spend this peak season managing crises or demonstrating rapid, strategic growth. Organizations that build resilience now will spend November showcasing operational excellence rather than explaining their mishaps in January.

Michael Johnson is vice president of business consulting at Deposco, AI-powered supply chain software.