How to Get Your Brand Ready for Peak Season

Hi everyone and welcome. Thank you so much for joining me today to talk about peak season. Last year, we did an internal peak season panel with our operations team and it really gave us such a great look behind the scenes at what goes into prepping for our biggest season of the year. The planning, the backup plans, and everything that happens in between to make sure that we're really ready to support our clients. So this year, we were thinking, let's take that conversation a step further, bring it outside of ShipNetwork, and bring in a few more perspectives from across the business to talk about how we're preparing for peak and what we're thinking beyond it. So hopefully there are some things that brands can take away from that conversation too. So whether you're fulfilling in house, working with a partner and just trying to gauge how prepared you really are, or maybe you're starting to think about what you want to do differently after this peak. We'll get right into it. But before we do, I would like love to give everyone a moment to introduce themselves and give our audience a bit of context into your background and your experience. So let's start, with Carolyn. Sounds great. My name's Carolyn Martin. I have been with ShipNetwork for a few months now, so I recently joined the team, but have over fifteen years of experience in the industry working with brands from both direct to consumer, b to b, wholesale, and retail. So excited to have this discussion with everyone. Hey. Nice to meet everyone. Damien here, VP of ops, based in Salt Lake City, Utah. I've been with ShipNetwork coming up on seven years now. I was working for a company that was acquired by ShipNetwork before that. So I've been it feels like with the company ten years now, so this will be my, tenth peak season. Hello. Paul Tran here, VP of IT. Been with ShipNetwork for four years. Prior to this, was with another company for about fifteen, twenty years, also in the three p l fulfillment space. Also have about twenty five years in LTL and b to b, b c to c industry as well. Hi. I'm Gina Payton. I am based out of Las Vegas, Nevada. I've been with ShipNetwork for coming up on five years now, And I have, gosh, thirty plus years of b to b experience. In addition, also direct to consumer experience as well across a variety of industries. And Steve? Yep. Steve Newsome. I have been with ShipNetwork for just about a year, and I've been in the industry for a little over twenty years. Most of my career is on what ShipNetwork would consider the client side. So I have a lot of experience on that side of things, and so I I have the opportunity to take that experience into consideration as I operate here at ShipNetwork, and I'm based in Salt Lake City. And, Steve, you've been with ShipNetwork for maybe not that long, but like you said, you actually have experience with ShipNetwork as a client, which brings a really great perspective to this conversation as well. All right. So let's get started. Damien, I would love to hear from you. From your perspective, when do you actually start thinking about peak, and what is it that you're trying to understand or have in place first? Yeah. Peak finding actually starts right after peak, the first part. So while things are real fresh on everyone's mind, we do some postmortem meetings. Tends to be a little bit late January because peak outbound wise ends when we get up to Christmas, then we turn into return season. That gets pretty heavy through January to give everyone a little bit of a break, but we do hit it pretty hard with some postmortem meetings in January. The purpose of those are mainly just like I said, while things are fresh, we wanna know what went well, what didn't go so great, and then work with our IT team of some things that we may wanna put in place from a technology perspective to make us more efficient. And so that's kind of the the first time we start thinking about it. And then we'll do some more formal planning several several months before peak. So we're in the middle of it now. We started end of July is when we'll start having conversations of what we need to get in place, and that really evolves around what do we think the volume's gonna look like. We start gathering forecast for clients so that we can start understanding what does headcount need to look like, what does training need to look like, do we have the infrastructure, the equipment, and a lot of other things in place. So it's almost feels like we're talking about it year round. Yeah. There's a lot that goes into it. I bet. I mean, for operations, it's easy to see that peak season, like, is the thing that you're preparing for all year. I think one of the things that maybe is not so obvious for some people is just how important it is from the IT standpoint to prepare for peak as well. Paul, I'd love to hear from you. Well, I'd say, Damien nailed it on the head because we're always thinking about peak. Even, you know, for for the, following peak and the previous peak, we're we're looking at, the same things that operations also, may have experienced during during the peak period too. As Damien mentioned, we'll do a postmortem discussion. We'll look at, what went right, what went wrong, update our our work you know, our workloads and and figure out, hey. How do we make this better? How we improve? We do that along, operations too because they also see, you know, what value that may have to improve the process and make it more efficient. So we're planning pretty much year round. The actual work that's being done, obviously, isn't, you know, isn't worked on until we talk to operations and the business to see what improvements or enhancements we can make, but those get added to our roadmap. During the year, we work on those things. We deliver them before this peak. And then as Damien also mentioned, we're looking at forecasting and projecting this year's volumes. And then we're also actively running those through our platform to ensure that capacity is available. We're not seeing any load issues when we're, you know, when we're running inventory syncs at heavy loads as peak volume, you know, as we run through peak volume from historical data. So a lot of work is being done ahead of peak, prior to peak, and then also through peak. We're also, continuing to work and develop. We're just in our kind of our freeze period at that point, but we're still working on, enhancements during that time as well. Yeah. That makes sense. The tech systems need to be in place and working smoothly for us to even get those orders through the system to pick and process. Great point. We know that as much as we plan for peak, there is always something that happens, always things that we can't expect or even plan for. So I'm curious how knowing that your teams are preparing for the unexpected, you could say. Gina, I would love to hear from you. Yes. Mean, you can't plan for every exception. But the goal is really to make sure we're prepared with a response or a plan when something unexpected happens. So it really means having clear communication paths, escalation paths as well, knowing who can make decisions, where we can be flexible without disrupting the operation. All of those things can be decided ahead of time. And I think transparency is super key here, and that's both on the client side as well as the partner side. So if something changes being transparent with your 3PL about what changed. Same thing if something's changing on our side that we're being transparent with our clients and our customers about what that might look like. So we might not be able to predict the problem, but we can certainly prepare for how we respond to it. Yeah, that's a good point. The only way to know if it's gonna impact a party is for them to know what's actually happening, what's changing. Great point. Steve, I'd love to hear from you. How do you prepare your routines for the unexpected? Yeah. One of the things that I think that we're looking at is continuous improvement throughout the year. So we're gonna be evaluating our SOPs. We're gonna be evaluating how we operate with different clients and looking for ways to improve before peak hits. Some of those things that we could do to adjust to make peak a little bit smoother. Damien kind of touched on this where we do a postmortem after peak season to start evaluating, you know, the different difficulties and hurdles that we overcame during peak. We're doing that through the entire year. Also, I think, you know, one of the other things that that we're working on is to create space and create an opportunity for kind of receiving and and maintaining that flexibility that Gina talked about. One of the things that is easy to add is labor throughout peak, but it's very difficult to add fifty thousand square feet when you need it. So, that's something that I think ShipNetwork is very good at is making sure that we have that flexibility throughout peak to be able to serve all of our clients. Yeah. That makes sense. So, maybe the goal here isn't necessarily to predict every possible thing that could happen, but really have the systems in place for that flexibility, for the visibility, and more than anything, communication internally and externally with our clients and our partners. So I wanna move away from the pre peak planning, and let's talk about the reality of it. Peak is here, holiday sales are live, orders are flowing. So the teams are, you know, doing their thing, supporting our clients, what changes for you and your role and with your teams? Once we're actually in full peak season mode? What are you looking for and watching more closely? Yeah, I mean, once peak is live, we go from kind of planning mode to active partnership mode. So and this is both internally and externally. So we're staying close to our clients, we're staying close to the operation, we're watching for signals, we're, you know, communicating proactively throughout the process and really trying to address small issues before they become big issues. So I think that is really just a piece of what we're doing is just always wanting to keep our finger on the pulse, not waiting for someone to raise the problem, but actually catching it as it's happening so we can avoid any bigger issues. Paul, maybe from your side on the tax the tax standpoint, what is it that you're looking at closely? What is it that your teams are watching out for? So, we have a switch that happens within IT. So we certainly move from a, you know, development focused, organization to, you know, specifically support of operations of customer service and of of our clients or or brands as well. So specifically, what we're looking for is any lag time in the systems or any latency. Generally, we're paying very close attention to any process that's that's either hanging or just high volume order processing that's happening. You know, a lot of that is already, you know, determined because we've already ran a lot of simulations prior to peak, but, of course, you know, reality is different from simulation. So we are very proactive. We're twenty four hours. We're on call. So all of our teams are basically prepared for peak, and and, you know, everybody's been on you know, seasoned on what to do, and they know what to do. So a lot of communication is happening between, our organization, between myself and, my team, and also between, all of the leaders and other, members of of the the company are also in communication. So again, we are all planning and preparing and monitoring as much as possible when things do happen and the unexpected happens. I would love to hear from this group, maybe some of those stories from past peak seasons, what has happened, some of those unexpected moments and instances where the team really just had to step up and deliver for clients. Yeah. I can step in there. So the the reality is a peak. We do all this planning, and we're just obviously ready to execute on that plan. But the the the reality is is things don't ever go to plan. Forecasts are always wrong. Promotional sales hit harder than we expect. There's inventory delays. So it's actually pretty normal for things not to go as planned. So all the planning is really a lot of it's revolved around just acting up where the constraints can be or potentially could be and making sure we have some flexible operations and plans in place. And so it's really almost an every hour exercise we're going through is looking at, okay, this is what we're applying, this is the reality what actually hit, where do we need to shift people over, where do we need to order more supplies, where do we need to bring in more labor. It's happening constantly. So there's you know, there's there's hundreds of different examples I could be providing, but the reality is we are, you know, difference of peak versus like a normal period because we are monitoring stuff like every half hour, every hour to see where we need to pivot. Whereas like period times, maybe we're looking daily, weekly at some of these trends. But when you're dealing with that type of volume, can't afford to get behind, you know, more than thirty minutes to an hour. Otherwise, that's just gonna, compound and become a bigger issue. So very much in the nature for things to not go as planned. So really all the planning about is just building that flexibility and extra capacity so we can move things around so we can, you know, recover for when things don't go as planned. I think something to add to that real quick too is sometimes I think that the deviation from the plan feels chaotic or can look chaotic. And in reality, this team spends a lot of time planning out what that deviation looks like in in the case of the chaos that occurs during peak. And so we really are staying on our plan. It's just a deviation to that plan. And and we I think this team does a really great job at executing on that. So it's the plan b and c and d that get pulled in as needed. But that's true. You guys have gone through those multiple times, every peak, and you're you're ready to face them as they come. So that's great. I think all of this sets the stage really well for, maybe some of the expectations and the things that fulfillment companies that brands should be doing if they're fulfilling in house and maybe have a little bit less experience under their belts, I would love to bring in Carolyn to kind of open up that question of like, what should brands expect from their fulfillment partner? Maybe they're working with a new 3PL. Maybe it's their first peak and they're doing it themselves. Talk us through a little bit of what should be expected from them as they're going into peak season? Yeah. No. Great question. And, you know, really, there's a few different points in this, but I think one of the most important things is to protect the core SLAs, not just the throughput. So a lot of people think, oh, we have this spike in volume. We have this massive amount of increase in orders. Just get them out the door. Get them out the door. And that's not the case. You really need to protect those core SLAs because if it's not done correctly, then in the world we live in today, it's gonna be all over social media. It's gonna impact the brand. And you want a partner that is truly an extension of your brand and realizes that and doesn't want that impact to happen on your brand side negatively. You know, with those core SLAs, order accuracy is so important. You gotta get the right order out. Again, this is the holiday season. So can you imagine if it's a toy company and the wrong toy goes to a child and it's last minute gift Yeah. And now their entire experience, you know, for that family has a negative. So order accuracy is really important. Order processing timelines as well. Stick to those SLAs that you've agreed upon with your fulfillment partner. Same with receiving an inventory accuracy. We wanna make sure that we have the inventory in our hands and the right inventory so those brands can do those sales. They can push that volume higher and higher because they know that they can rely on the fulfillment partner to have the accurate numbers of their inventory of what's in stock. Also, we've talked about it a ton, but communication. You've gotta be proactive, especially all the time, but especially during peak season. What are the early warning, you know, risks? Have those conversations. Talk about it before peak. If we see x, let's do y, and have those contingency plans in place so people are aware of if we're deviating or if you're changing your path. It's all been actually planned out. And then transparent reporting. Again, we're all not perfect, but if you report accurately and your partners know that they have faith in you and what you're providing them is accurate, that's better than keeping it to yourself or not being transparent with what's going on. And then last, just have clear ownership of the issues. So during peak, who's handling what? Who's responsible for what? Whether it's the brand or the fulfillment center, have a clear expectation of who's handling what. So when an issue does arise, you don't lose that time by wondering, okay. Who's gonna take this? Who's resolving this? What's going on? All really, really great points. And I think one of the things that you touched on and earlier we touched on a little bit is having visibility into the actual performance. And we need to do something with that. Right? So what is something that brands should be thinking about after peak and are not just kind of saying, okay, we're through it. We'll call it a win. Moving on. Let's do something with that experience and really build on it to make sure we're making those improvements year over year. I'd love to start with Gina. What should a brand be looking back at and determining, okay, was this a one off or is this actually showing us a bigger problem? Yeah, first of all, and we will as well as expect a client to celebrate the win, right? This is like a huge accomplishment to get through peak season. So like first and foremost, celebrate the success of what is maybe the most stressful type of year for most brands. But when reflecting back, think you've kind of touched on it as well as really figuring out, was this, like if you had a challenge, was it peak season related or was it maybe a systemic thing that you need to address? And so they can ask themselves questions like, was this related to a volume spike? Was unexpected event? Was it a weather event? Was it something that they can explain in terms of it being probably just a peak season issue? But if they saw the same exceptions, the same communication gaps, maybe the same sort of manual workarounds or ways that they had to solve for something, or maybe a repeated customer issue that kept reoccurring, it's likely that this is something that is systemic and needs to be addressed. So, and that's something I would ask the client to look at, but it's also something we would look at internally as a business. And that's a sign there's something that should change and that in the post mortem, you're identifying those things, you're creating plans very quickly for how do we prevent that from happening again, or how do we plan better for that going forward? I want to bring it back to this peak before we kind of wrap up here. And for the brands that are heading into peak now, is there one thing that they can still do today before that peak surge hits and maybe something that they should definitely commit to after peak rolls around, and they can kind of catch their breath and revisit what happened. Yeah. You know, whether brands are doing for themselves or using other three PL, I just make sure that they're asking themselves what are the two, three biggest risks, that could go wrong and evaluate what those, you know, plan b's are. If those do go wrong and if, obviously, they have that three p l, make sure that they're having those conversations with them to understand what the expectations are. If they're doing their own fulfillment, then, you know, run that through their own operational team. I'll say one little industry, like, insight from an operate operator's perspective that I think today would, you know, will tell you whether, you're gonna have problems or not is I think, one thing that gets overlooked is just inventory management, how clean the inventory is in an operation warehouse. And so highly encourage, brands, specifically if you're doing your own fulfillment, to look at, you know, what pickers in in cases where they're skipping inventory locations can't find items. If you have that problem outside of peak, that is just going to compound, during peak. And, yeah, you can't just throw bodies at that type of situation. Just a little insider, like, you know, if there's one quick way I can get a really quick pulse on if a building's ready outside of obviously getting the labor in place, people trained up, and the infrastructure is just getting bolts on how clean the inventory is. I think one thing too brands can do is they can run a peak readiness review with their fulfillment partner. And within that review, they can agree on communication and escalation protocols. And it just really helps set the stage before peak on what to expect. Just on basic questions of what volumes are expected, what triggers an escalation, and, again, who owns the decisions so that they can make sure that they get through those things quickly, and efficiently when they come up. Just from the client perspective, something that kind of I spent a good chunk of my career in is transportation and managing that transportation on the client side. It's the touch point to the customer. So that is what the customer is interacting with is that delivery. Something that I would have done a lot in the past is managing that transportation myself and holding on to those contracts, having those carrier relationships, negotiating those rates. Something that I've grown to love with ShipNetwork is their ability to manage that and take on that responsibility. So something that ShipNetwork just, I think, excels at and does really great is maintaining those carrier relationships, making sure that the carriers that they're partnered with have the capacity to take on the volumes that we're expecting through peak season and then have the ability to execute for those clients. And that is something that is unmatched in the industry, and I think it's really important to be able to partner with a fulfillment center that can can maintain that for you throughout peak and connect with your customers in a better way than you could yourself. That's a great point, And that could probably be an entire conversation just talking about that aspect. I do want to wrap up this session with some closing thoughts and got one final statement from everyone. If you were to complete the sentence, a brand is truly ready for peak when? I would say that a brand is truly ready for peak when they have confidence not only in their forecast, but in the people, processes, and partners that they've aligned themselves to execute it with. Yeah. I'll continue on with when the inventory is clean, but also getting orders out, you know, weeks prior to peak should be a breeze. Like it should be not a problem whatsoever. That'll be a key sign that you're ready. It's a great question. I think a brand is ready when they are able to get all the data that they need. The integrations, whether they're new or existing have been tested, you know, and we're running, you know, free and clear data all through the systems end to end. If there's any preexisting issues, obviously those will be accentuated during peak because of the volumes. So we'd want to work through those obviously prior to peak. I think a brand is truly ready for peak when it has more than a plan. And what I mean by that is there is aligned expectations. I think Carolyn just touched on this clear ownership, who's doing what proactive communication. I can't drive that one home enough and the ability to adapt when the reality doesn't follow the plan. So I think a brand's ready when they're partnered with the right people. So whether that's internal to their own brand and they have the right partnerships within their own organization or external and just being partnered with the right people that are gonna help execute throughout peak. Thank you guys, everyone so much for bringing in your perspectives. It was so fun to hear not just from our ops team, but from all of the different pieces that really lead to a successful peak season. And I think that one of the biggest takeaways from today is that peak really should not be its own standalone event. And the work that you're doing before peak really determines how effectively you can respond when things change, when the unexpected happens. But it's really about making sure that those lessons afterward are applied and you do more with the experiences that you have so that every year you're just building a stronger and stronger system. So for the brands that are heading into peak now, hopefully this conversation gives you some things to think about today and over the next few months as we get into peak season and after. And for everyone here and everyone watching, best of luck going into this next peak season. And I would love to connect with you all when it's all over.