Planning for Peak Season: A Practical Guide for Logistics Teams

The first sign peak season is coming usually isn’t a forecast or a spreadsheet. It’s the moment you realize you’re already behind, and nobody has even said the words “peak season” out loud yet.

If you’ve worked logistics for more than five minutes, you know how this goes. The volume creeps up, the phone starts ringing more, and the “normal” plan quietly stops working. Peak season isn’t one big event. It’s a slow pileup of small problems that all hit at the same time, and the teams that do well are usually the ones who saw the pileup forming early.

Storage and overflow planning (and why it gets weird fast)

Storage is one of the first things to quietly fail during peak season. It’s rarely dramatic. It’s just pallets stacked in the wrong place, lanes blocked, pick paths broken, and suddenly every task takes longer than it should.

The problem is that most warehouses are designed for normal flow. They’re not designed for a temporary surge where inbound arrives early, outbound ships late, and returns start coming back before anyone has space for them. Even well-run sites can get messy during peak because the building itself becomes the bottleneck, not the people.

This is also where overflow planning matters more than people like to admit. You can add labor. You can pay for extra trailers. But if you physically don’t have room to stage product, you’re stuck.

If you’ve never planned for temporary storage before, it helps to think in “units of chaos.” Every time you add a new storage method, you add complexity, and complexity creates mistakes. So the goal isn’t just more space. It’s more space that your team can actually manage without losing control.

Search for shipping containers for sale to create secure, temporary on-site storage for slow-moving inventory or packaging materials that take up space but don’t need daily access.

That only works if it’s treated as part of the operating plan, not a last-minute fix. The container has to be placed where it won’t block traffic, labeled clearly, and tracked like any other storage location. Otherwise it turns into a steel box full of mystery items, and no one wants that.

Forecasting: good enough beats perfect

A lot of peak season stress comes from trying to predict volume too precisely. Teams chase the perfect forecast, and they lose time. Then peak arrives, and the forecast is wrong anyway.

Forecasting for peak should be about ranges, not exact numbers. You need a “low,” “expected,” and “high” scenario. That’s it. And each scenario should tie to a real operational plan.

For example, what happens if you’re 15% above expected? Do you add a second shift? Do you move order cutoff times? Do you push some SKUs to slower service levels? These decisions should be made while everyone is still calm enough to think.

Also, don’t trust a forecast that doesn’t include promotions, marketing campaigns, or pricing changes. A single discount event can change your week more than any seasonal trend. Consumer habits shift fast now. People buy earlier. Then they stop. Then they buy again when they see a deal. It’s not smooth.

Transportation capacity: book early, but stay flexible

Peak season transportation planning is basically a game of “reserve what you can, then improvise.” You need committed capacity, but you also need options when that capacity gets disrupted.

If you rely heavily on spot market freight, peak season will punish you. Rates rise, trucks disappear, and service gets unpredictable. Even if you’re willing to pay, you might not get the equipment you need. And if you’re shipping to retail or to strict appointment windows, missed pickups can become chargebacks.

The best approach is usually a blended strategy. Lock in core lanes with contract carriers, and then keep a backup list for overflow. The backup list should not be random. It should be carriers you’ve tested before. Peak season is not the time to find out a carrier’s tracking is unreliable or their claims process is a nightmare.

Inventory accuracy is the quiet killer

Inventory problems during peak are brutal because they look like everything else. Orders go late. Picks get shorted. Customers complain. People assume it’s “just peak.” But sometimes it’s not peak. It’s that the inventory file is wrong.

Peak season makes inventory accuracy harder because product moves faster, and shortcuts get taken. People skip scans. They move pallets without updating locations. They stage product in random places because the dock is full. Then a week later, no one can find it.

A practical way to prepare is to do targeted cycle counts before peak. Not everything. Just the SKUs that matter most. High-volume items, high-value items, and anything that causes a mess when it’s missing.

Also, look at your packaging inventory. Boxes, tape, labels, dunnage. These are boring until they run out. Then everything stops. You don’t want your team standing around because you ran out of a specific box size that everyone assumed would always be there.

Build a peak playbook you can actually use

A peak season playbook sounds like a nice idea until you realize most playbooks are too long, too polished, and not used by anyone.

A useful playbook is short. It’s built around decisions. It answers questions like:

What do we do when the dock is full?
What do we do when labor doesn’t show up?
What do we do when a carrier misses pickups three days in a row?
What gets prioritized when we fall behind?

These aren’t theoretical questions. They happen every year.

If you can document the basic responses and who owns them, you reduce the amount of emotional decision-making during peak. That matters. Because peak season isn’t only about operational capacity. It’s about mental capacity too.

And once your team is tired, even simple problems feel personal. The goal of planning is to reduce that feeling. Not eliminate it, because you won’t. But reduce it enough that people can keep thinking clearly, even when everything is loud.