The Holiday Bottleneck You Can Control: Fixing Inefficient Operations

This holiday season, retailers face a different kind of pressure. PwC forecasts gift spending will fall 11 percent year-over-year as consumers grow more selective in the face of tariff impacts and economic uncertainty.

Many brand leaders are responding by fine-tuning last-mile fulfillment. However, some of the biggest risks to peak performance lie further upstream in the supply chain’s first mile, where delays between purchase orders and warehouse delivery can stall the entire operation.

This is where operations teams spend countless hours tracking supplier updates, reconciling purchase orders, and digging for answers in emails or spreadsheets. These manual, repetitive tasks quietly add up to multiple lost workdays each week.

And in the compressed timelines of peak season, that lost time translates directly into slower replenishment cycles, higher costs, and missed opportunities to meet customer demand. Holiday readiness doesn’t start at the warehouse door; it starts with efficiency in the first mile.

The Human Cost of Manual Work

When operations teams spend more time chasing updates than planning strategy, the impact is clear. Hours lost to spreadsheets and endless email threads cut into margins and slow the business. Each delayed status update or duplicated entry risks missed deadlines, misaligned production schedules, and costly expedited shipping expenses.

Across brands that still rely heavily on manual processes, several patterns consistently emerge:

• Fragmented Visibility: Siloed information across tools, teams and vendors forces leaders to make decisions with incomplete or outdated data, increasing the chance of costly errors.
• Reactive Firefighting: Without early warning signals, teams only learn about supplier delays once they’ve cascaded into stockouts or late deliveries, eroding customer trust and margin.
• Hidden Labor Costs: Highly skilled employees spend disproportionate amounts of time on low-value work, creating burnout and turnover risk.

At a time when talent retention and margin preservation are top priorities, these inefficiencies amount to more than lost hours. They threaten a brand’s ability to compete, especially during the holiday rush, when every delay and stockout matters.

What High-Performing Teams Do Differently

The good news? Leading brands are reclaiming time and improving margins without expanding headcount. Three strategies stand out:

1. Automate routine updates. Real-time dashboards and automated milestone tracking eliminate the need for endless back-and-forth emails. Instead of asking suppliers for status updates, teams see them instantly.
2. Integrate data sources. Connecting procurement, logistics, and finance to create a single source of truth helps brands forecast more accurately, plan replenishment, and spot issues before they escalate.
3. Invest in real-time visibility. High-performing operations teams don’t wait for problems to surface; they anticipate them. By setting up alerts, running “what-if” scenarios, and modeling the impact of delays or surges, they’re able to pivot seamlessly from plan A to plan B or C.

Together, these strategies shift operations from reactive firefighting to proactive control. Peak season isn’t the time for trial and error, so teams must make investments now. Those that do can use the time to strengthen supplier relationships, negotiate costs, and plan for growth while competitors are still chasing updates.

The Holiday Imperative

With peak season around the corner, the stakes are higher than ever for brands. Running their operations on spreadsheets risks employee burnout and margin loss when demand spikes. However, brands that have built first-mile efficiency into their playbooks can meet holiday volume without costly last-minute fixes.

Holiday readiness doesn’t start in the warehouse or the delivery van. It starts with the everyday workflows that shape how quickly and accurately products move through the supply chain. By reducing manual friction in the first mile, brands give themselves the best gift of all this season: time to focus on customers, protect margins, and deliver on promises when it matters most.

Rodney Manzo is the senior director of Sage Supply Chain Intelligence (formerly Anvyl), which transforms how SMBs manage supply chain execution by bridging real-time visibility and control to the first mile of the supply chain.