The holiday season is coming up and has the potential to bring joy to revellers worldwide. Also, it can strike the heart of people who are not prepared for the season. To maximize the revenue potential to meet client expectations and peak season, retailers should consider many factors, from client demands to channel alignments. Here it may sound a bit daunting, but if you take some steps ahead of time, the retailers can prepare well for the spike season, ease the stress, and join thor folks to enjoy the sale.
Let’s have a look at the top ways to ensure success during peak season:
Perfect planning will prevent poor performance:
It should have gone further without saying to take time out to prepare for busy periods to improve performance and alleviate issues. The winter holidays are one of the peak seasons for sale for retailers, and however, the demand is there around the year and may vary significantly based on the market and retailer.
Planning your year will help the retailers minimize surprises. Forecast and historical volume data can provide deep insights and how well your supply chain and warehouses are well equipped to manage the order. Once the peak times are identified, the managers should look for a checklist to know the key activities they have to accomplish in the upcoming months. Developing a project plan with specific dates and objectives is quite important as reaching out to the key business vendors and partners to secure their support.
Train your temps:
The temporary workers are hired a lot in peak seasons, and a big organization at times hires thousands of workers temporarily to fulfil high order volumes. Also, many parcel carriers oor companies like Freight People hire 90,000 temporary employees to help them with the added orders, and many of these shipments can be time-sensitive and should arrive on scheduled time.
It is easy to have a look at how the workers influx can present challenges for you. How do retailers have many temporary workers to look at peak productivity efficiently and quickly? One of the easier processes to administer the profiles for new workers is to ensure that new workers have access to the tools and systems they require. Reviewing the security regulations and procedures is the first step. It can also help new hires to know the onboarding process and enable a fast turnaround.
Eliminate delivery delays with the help of real-time visibility solutions:
Clients do look for delivery providers concerning the time. While placing the orders, the buyers usually look for knowledgeable, well-informed and updated client service to guide them through their issues and queries.
Delays allow people to think that businesses are not respecting their time and challenge the logistic providers to manage client expectations. In peak seasons, managing the client expectation is the biggest challenge. The delivery experience provided by the logistics providers does determine future orders.
The peak period lasts soon and always has a short period to deliver the products. Businesses at this time cannot afford to process the deliveries in batches as they usually do. This is the time for tight supply chain monitoring to have a quick delivery timing for esteemed clients. Hence having real-time visibility is important for successful sales for peak delivery period.
Peak periods always have a short period to cater to. Businesses cannot process deliveries in batches as the clients expect quicker delivery, and tight monitoring is required. Hence in this scenario, real-time visibility is important for projecting sales in the peak delivery period. It will eliminate the requirement for clients to contact the service centres and will help in monitoring the shipments to identify the delays at the last minute.
Planning the logistics for delivery periods:
For the planning process, data that can be received from past deliveries and sales during peak periods can come in handy for you. It will help in framing the order fulfilment strategies for last-minute deliveries.
Planning according to the previous year’s peak period performances can help you in dealing with many bottlenecks. The report will showcase the information based on reliable suppliers and customer complaints and projects the exact sales and revenue received last time.
There are a lot of aspects for consideration for planning the logistics operations for the peak delivery period. Have a look at some of them:
- Arrange for reliable cargo insurance and also devise some security measures against damage and theft.
- Also, work out realistic budget plans inclusive of shipping expenditure.
- Storage facility cost.
- Prepare demand forecasting for different channels, carriers, regions and also e-commerce fulfilment centres.