Preparing for Peak Season Pressures

Peak season is the time of year when retailers see their revenues surge, making it the focal point of their annual operations. While efforts to spread out consumer demand have reduced the focus on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the holiday shopping rush remains a pivotal make-or-break event for fulfillment operations and the brands they support.

Today, peak season is a period when it's critical for retailers to deliver on their customer promise. This includes ensuring the right items are in stock on brick-and-mortar shelves and meeting the demands for online order deliveries, which often require arrival within two days or less.

It is, for all intents and purposes, game time. And like any major event, key players understandably experience pregame jitters — a feeling reinforced by the realization that there aren’t enough days to deploy new automated systems, formulate new distribution plans, or hire more highly experienced warehouse employees.

There are, however, proven steps retail fulfillment leaders can take now to turn peak season challenges into opportunities. It begins with simple, yet often overlooked steps:

1. Gather operational intelligence. Treat every peak season as an opportunity to gather insights for future holiday shopping periods. While it may be too late to implement new systems or make significant shifts for 2025, now is the time to identify data, lessons and insights from the fulfillment operation in the months to come. At the most basic level, this includes understanding what works and doesn’t work well, and where bottlenecks occur. Armed with such insights, fulfillment leaders can close out the 2025 season with a clear sense of where improvements can be made.
2. Collect year-over-year data on order profiles. Look closely at what products are frequently purchased during the peak season. These insights are invaluable when designing automated warehouse systems optimized for both holiday shopping and year-round operations. Notably, warehouse systems should not be designed solely for peak levels, as this leads to idle automation for much of the year. Instead, omnichannel strategies can help repurpose retail capacity to support peak e-commerce demands.
3. Communicate with marketing. Warehouse leaders should always be in communication with the marketing team, particularly in the months leading up to peak. It’s crucial to understand which items will feature aggressive promotions and which are expected to be fast movers. This knowledge allows warehouse teams to optimize operations to meet the demand of marketing pushes and high-demand items during peak periods. This philosophy can also be applied for other sales periods.
4. Embrace a staggered approach. With a deep understanding of order profiles, fulfillment leaders can optimize warehouse operations for the ideal movement of popular items. Staggering operations can also be helpful. For example, an omnichannel retailer might plan for two peaks — the first to stock brick-and-mortar stores and the second to fulfill online orders. To ensure no downtime during peak, all maintenance should be completed beforehand, allowing maintenance shifts to focus on fulfillment operations.
5. Add flexibility to automation. Consider where small adjustments to existing warehouse systems can add capacity. For example, leasing autonomous mobile robots, adding shuttles to existing automated storage and retrieval systems (AS/RS), or using robotic pickers to augment goods-to-person picking efforts can make a significant difference.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, remember that the success of all retail operations ultimately depends on people — and warehouses and distribution centers are no exception. During peak season, ensure that your top warehouse leaders, best item pickers, and most skilled maintenance professionals are on the floor, supported by tools and automation designed to make their jobs as efficient and safe as possible.

Andy Lockhart, director of strategic engagement for North American warehouse solutions at Vanderlande, provides retail customers with the innovative, scalable systems, intelligent software and reliable services needed to optimize distribution and fulfillment operations.