Christmas in July – why Peak season warehouse preparation starts now | Socius24
Christmas in July: why Peak prep starts now
No-one wants to think about December in the middle of summer.
Usually the phrase “Christmas in July” on its own is enough to make most people shudder.
But if you’re going to do something about Peak, then now is the time to start (sorry to be a buzzkill).
And that’s because the warehouses that get through Peak in one piece are typically not the ones that are working the hardest in November. They’re the ones who did all of the boring peak season warehouse preparation way back in Q2 and Q3, rather than muttering to themselves that Q4 is AGES away.
What breaks an operation during Peak is almost never a freak event. It’s all of the decisions that got put off in July because they just didn’t feel urgent enough to deal with. But right now, during the relative calm of summer, you’ve got the one thing you won’t have in October:
Time to sort things out before they turn into full-blown emergencies.
So, if you’re looking for some ideas, this is what the most organised operations are already working on:
1. Staffing sums: sort your Peak labour before autumn
Agency labour gets more expensive and harder to come by the closer you get to Peak.
Everyone knows this. It’s not news. We’re not telling you anything that you don’t already know. The scramble for staff happens every single year. Which means that if you start to advertise for temporary pickers in late autumn, you’ll be up against every other warehouse in the region for the same shrinking pool of people, all paying the highest rates of the year.
Jobs that you can do during the summer aren’t particularly exciting or glamorous, but they ARE effective. You could spend some time working out what your real throughput ceiling is with the headcount you’ve got. Or you could identify where the actual bottlenecks are. Or maybe you could have a think about how many extra people you genuinely need, as opposed to the amount of them that you panic-hired last time. That sum will depend on having numbers that you trust about your own operation, which is its own problem… and one that a surprising number of warehouses can’t solve with any confidence.
Then, there’s the on-boarding time to think about, too.
A temp who starts in September and knows the warehouse layout by November is worth three who have to get up to speed from a standing start during Peak week. And that lead time can often be the bit that gets forgotten until it’s far too late to do anything about it.
2. Customs and Duty timing
If you’re importing stock for Peak, Q4 deadlines have a nasty habit of arriving much earlier than anyone thought possible:
- Goods that get stuck in customs over a bank holiday.
- Duty payments that need to be worked around your cashflow.
- Customs warehousing arrangements that really should have been set up months ago, when costs could be negotiated down to reasonable levels.
None of these things is dramatic when taken in isolation. But any of them can contribute to a genuinely bad week if they’re left until the stock is already on its way.
Duty deferral and Customs warehousing aren’t things that you want to be dealing with under pressure. They come with application timelines, approval processes and all manner of pernickety rules. Which means that summer is the best time to get any arrangements in place, so that as soon as your containers hit dry land in Q4, all of the necessary paperwork has already been done, and your stock can actually get to you in a timely, and much less stressful, fashion.
3. Putaway and slotting rules: is what was true then still true now?
Here’s a top tip. Your WMS directs putaway, so that your operators will follow the system’s instructions rather than guessing where stock should go. That’s the whole point of using directed putaway, and it works. The problem is that the rules upon which those putaway decisions are based are only ever as good as the last time that someone actually looked at them.
Product mix can change: last Peak’s fast movers might be this year’s obsolete stock.
And slotting logic that was optimal twelve months ago might have now become the single biggest reason that your pickers are walking miles that they don’t need to walk (and taking much longer to do that). Because if you don’t make changes to it, your system will keep executing everything that it was told to do, and how it was told to do it. Perfectly. Because that’s its job. The instructions will continue to be right. But what if the rules behind those instructions have gone stale?
Summer is the best time to review things like this.
You’ve got the time to look at what’s actually happening right now, reconfigure the putaway and slotting logic around this year’s projected demand, and let the directed workflows do their work against current data instead of last year’s guesses.
Just so you know, now is also the best time to implement pick path optimisation. Optioryx Pulse works directly with Dispatcher WMS move tasks to optimise your routes in real time. Which means that getting the underlying rules right in Q3 gives that optimisation some excellent foundations to build on when your volumes start to spike.
4. How much visibility is enough visibility?
When Peak starts and everything’s moving everywhere, all at once, the operations that are able to stay calm are the ones where everyone can see what’s happening. Right here, right now. They’re the ones where the warehouse manager isn’t fielding calls from carriers asking where their loads are. They’re the ones where drivers and service partners already have the exact information that they need on their handhelds, instead of ringing the office to chase it. They’re the ones where the question “what’s the status of order 4471” takes three seconds rather than three people, three hours to answer.
Visibility like this is something that you need to build before Peak, because you know it’s not going to happen while you’re having the full-body experience of Peak itself.
User Services Portal (USP) can provide your workers with operation role-based workflows and your managers with a single view of what’s going on. The Mobile application pushes that information and useful functionality out to carriers, service partners and drivers, so that information travels with the work being completed, rather than getting stuck on someone’s desktop. AskUSP lets people ask the system questions in plain language instead of waiting for reports to be built. Which matters the most exactly when there’s no time left to build reports.
And if you want to go further into the IT side of things, summer is also the best window to test integrations under something like real load, rather than waiting to find out during week one of Peak that your connection falls over as soon as your volumes triple.
The quiet months (like July, for example) are when you can afford to break things and fix them properly, in time for Peak.
Which list is your warehouse on?
The brutal truth of the matter is that Peak rewards operations that are prepared and punishes the ones that are winging it. None of the above is difficult to do. It’s just easy to avoid, because in July, none of it feels important enough to bother about.
But the warehouses that come unstuck in November and December usually don’t hit some dramatic and unforeseeable disaster; they’re the ones that put off their unglamorous Q3 admin until it turned into a Q4 crisis.
We’ve spent thirty years watching operations go through Peak, the smooth ones and the painful ones, and we can tell you that warning signs tend to show up well before the season does.
If you’d find it useful to get a clear picture of where your operation stands before Peak creeps up on you, we’re always happy to talk things through. Book an obligation-free discovery call now.
FAQ: Peak season warehouse preparation
In Q2 and Q3. The operations that get through Peak in one piece are the ones that did the unglamorous prep work over summer: staffing sums, customs arrangements, slotting reviews and visibility. By October, agency labour is scarce and it’s expensive, and there’s no time left to fix anything properly, anyway.
Early enough that they know your warehouse before volumes spike. A temp who starts in September and knows the layout by November is worth three who have to get up to speed from a standing start during Peak week. Leaving recruitment until late autumn puts you up against every other warehouse in the area, competing for a shrinking pool of people at the highest rates of the year.
Because directed putaway is only ever as good as the rules behind it, and product mix changes. Last Peak’s fast movers might be this year’s obsolete stock, and slotting logic that was optimal twelve months ago can become the single biggest reason your pickers walk miles they don’t need to. Summer is the time to reconfigure those rules around this year’s projected demand.
It takes the phone calls out of the operation. When carriers, drivers and service partners can see the information they need on their own devices, and managers have a single live view, “what’s the status of order 4471” takes three seconds to answer rather than three people and three hours. Socius24’s User Services Portal (USP) and its Mobile application provide exactly this on top of Blue Yonder Dispatcher WMS.
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