Congratulations, you’ve survived another retail peak season! Thriving in 2025 starts by preparing now. The weeks leading into Black Friday likely brought a mix of anticipation and anxiety as you braced for the surge in demand. Now that the dust has settled, it’s time to take a strategic look back so you can apply what you learned to your 2025 planning. Including peak season preparation in your strategy for the entire year can build comfort and confidence, benefit your planning, and drive stronger performance for the coming year. In this article, we’ll explore best practices for peak season readiness, including high-level considerations to refine your strategy.

Peak Season Retrospective

Just as an agile team would conduct a retrospective at the end of a sprint, it is important to have candid discussions about performance during your completed peak season. In this discussion, you’ll include representatives from business, technology, and support teams who can present and discuss valuable insights that inform future strategy.

Key areas to assess include the following:

• Overall performance vs. peak goals across your entire organization, inclusive of all teams.
• What went well? Identify successes to replicate and build on.
• What didn’t go well? Pinpoint bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or unexpected challenges.
• What should we keep doing? Reinforce best practices that drive positive outcomes.
• What do we need to start doing? Explore opportunities for innovation or process improvements.
• What should we stop doing? Eliminate inefficiencies that add friction. 
• What needs to change? Address gaps in operations, technology, or resource allocation. 

This retrospective is not just a reflection—it’s a foundation for improvement. Some takeaways of this retrospective may require additional discussions to solve challenges, especially if those solutions will require investment dollars. What’s important is that the team leaves aligned around what you experienced and your desired path forward. To maintain momentum, commit to a timeline for bringing the team back together to close those open items and ensure that decisions lead to improvements before next peak season.

Set New Goals for Your Next Peak Season

Already? Absolutely. Setting goals is a critical step in building your strategy for the year. Defining clear objectives now will help you prioritize work to those items most likely to accomplish your desired results. Keep in mind that not every goal will require change. 

For example, if you are volume-testing your critical systems at a multiple of 2X or 3X, and your planned volume and your volume goals are safely beneath those test parameters, there’s no need to stretch that goal arbitrarily. Doing so may cause you to artificially inflate the value of one initiative or capability over another to improve system performance, but you may lose sight of overall business performance in the process. 

Assign Clear Peak Performance Ownership

Each team should be accountable for its peak performance within its sphere of ownership, but true success comes from structured ownership and alignment. Naming an owner whose individual goals align with accomplishing the overall peak goals reduces your chances of peak needs falling into the background as other “priorities” are given attention. 

Ideally, this person is aligned with peak-owner peers from other functional areas to maintain team accountability to peak success. Some larger companies may allocate one or two resources to manage peak prep and success centrally, but not all organizations have the labor budget to take on these additional resources. Creating a peak performance community of peers who collaborate and share insights can greatly improve your chances of success. Don’t put owners in silos.

If your company already has a regular operations planning meeting on the calendar, integrate peak season planning into that cadence early in the year. Your peak performance owners should build out an initial peak plan and have a standing spot to present their thoughts within that existing forum to present regular updates. This should be done well before you start independent peak planning meetings later in the year. Keeping peak readiness embedded in ongoing discussions will ensure that these items stay top of mind throughout the year and that none of the teams are caught off guard as preparation activities come up.

Incorporate Peak Season Preparation In Your Roadmap

Peak season planning means more than simply budgeting resources and dollars for explicit peak-related changes. This thought process misses the additional value of strategic alignment. Some thoughts to consider when finalizing your roadmap:

• Prioritize higher-risk items earlier in the year. It is essential to consider the risks associated with change, adoption, and functional stability when sequencing your work across the calendar. Go after your “big rocks” first—higher risk initiatives should be kept as far from retail peak as possible. This is particularly important for initiatives such as launching a new order management system, which may take six or more months to implement and stabilize.
• Evaluate whether new initiatives align with peak season goals. Major shifts such as taking on a large number of new stores, launching new categories or channels, or rebranding a portfolio will likely take significant time, energy, and resources. Ensure you have a rolling calendar of business activities mapped to prevent conflicts. If conflicts do arise, it doesn’t mean you drop the idea completely. However, you may need to potentially shift your approach proactively to better align with the desired results
• Incorporate Volume Performance Testing (VPT) into your roadmap. Larger technology and operational changes should be stress tested as they launch to make sure they can handle your peak volumes. VPT takes time, so you need to include that time in your overall plan to make room for the effort. We’ll talk about this more below in Performance Test Throughout the Year.
• Include major changes in your roadmap. Finally, yes, if an operational or system change is large enough to require dedicated time, dollar, and/or resource budget, and is likely to accomplish one or more of your peak goals, you should include the work in your roadmap.

Check Your Data and Analytics

Have you ever discussed a desired criteria for success only to find that you have no direct or practical way to measure it? Did you run into any issues this year understanding key performance metrics when it mattered most? If a metric is critical to your aligned definition of peak success, you need to be able to measure it in real time when it matters. This may require including data and analytics work in your roadmap or working with partners to ensure your existing tools have access to the right data. If it’s important, make sure you can track it—and act on it—when it counts.

Performance Test Throughout the Year

As mentioned above, performance testing should be an ongoing process rather than cramming it into late Q3 or early Q4 and scrambling to address non-performing areas last minute. Ideally, you should schedule quarterly testing that evaluates your total performance for critical capabilities in addition to the targeted VPT you are doing with larger deliveries. 

That said, performance testing requires preparation time, environment stabilization, execution, and mitigation, which can take a week or two out of your delivery schedule each time.  If quarterly testing isn’t feasible, target semi-annual testing as a minimum expectation. Below, you’ll find additional key considerations that may help your VPT journey.

• Prioritize the order lifecycle. The order lifecycle, especially order creation through fulfillment and sales posting, is the top performance challenge for most retailers. However, testing this means tracking significant volume into OMS then out to your fulfillment channels and back. It is critical that impacted cross-functional teams in this space collaborate and align on the approach to ensure any disruption is expected and planned for.
• Go beyond lab simulations. Leveraging a tool like Apache JMeter in a production-sized lower environment can be good for data flow, but  it won’t provide insight into your operational readiness. 
• Test real-world demand. If you can, work with your supply chain and retail operations teams to schedule time in production where you hold orders in OMS for a few days, building up demand volume. Then staff your fulfillment centers and stores for increased shipping volume on your target performance test dates. This will give you additional testing of the order lifecycle system performance on the fulfillment side and will also provide physical volume for your users to work through, which stress tests your operations. 
• Measure your operational impact. This approach will allow you to measure your operational units per hour (UPH) and ensure your resource training and sizing is planned into as accurately as possible for peak.
• Validate real-time monitoring. The lack of operational reporting and monitoring can be a bottleneck. Use these tests to assess whether your real-time operational performance and monitoring capabilities will perform under peak conditions.

Merchandise, Inventory, and Financial Planning

When you look back at Q4 promotions and product launches, ask yourself—did they go as planned? Some of you may have added promotions to move more volume of underperforming inventory and then may have still required deeper cuts to prices in January to bring that supply number down further. Others may have incentivized specific fulfillment types, like store pickup, to improve store traffic along with reducing some over-allocated units. Perhaps you just needed to try something to generate volume at times of lower-than-planned sales performance, scramble to replace unexpectedly popular items, swap marketing material last minute due to out-of-stocks, or maybe expedite delayed shipments to relieve pressure on your DCs and stores.

Whatever your experience was, a big-picture evaluation can inform more targeted purchasing in the coming year. Consider the following: 

• Inventory alignment: Did your buying strategy match customer demand? You should fine-tune your product selections and stock movement to better align with purchasing behaviors. 
• Allocation and fulfillment balance: Look at your planning and allocation processes and systems to make sure you’re allocating units across your network or fulfillment centers and stores based on shopping and delivery trends over the past year, through peak. Do you have the tools you need to succeed? 
• Strategic Markdowns & Promotions: Find opportunities to plan your promotional and clearance strategies more deliberately, taking more control over the margin impacts when weighted against your top and bottom line performance guidance. You may have opportunities to incentivize purchases with a lower overall margin impact or to clear aged inventory without relying on pricing alone.

Wherever your opportunities in planning lie, be sure you take the opportunity now to adjust based on the data produced during your closed attempts to add energy to your wins and find alternatives for your areas of struggle. Even an incremental improvement is a step toward future performance success.

Labor Planning Opportunities

Did you experience any delays due to resources through peak? Did you find times where people were inactive, or scraping to find something to do? Accurately planning labor continues to be a challenge for many companies, and it’s an expensive problem to have. You need to have the right number of people to optimize your manual activities, but you don’t want to bring in too many and risk margin performance for unproductive work. This challenge extends across your store network, fulfilment network, and customer care setup. 

To improve peak labor planning, consider these key inputs:

• Release to load, or similar measurement for order fulfillment: How long does it take for an order to be shipped when it is made available to process in your fulfillment locations? This includes stores for many of you. If this time is delaying customer orders beyond your promise, you’ll want to dig into your fulfillment steps and find the bottleneck(s). Those bottlenecks should then be evaluated for optimization to ensure your productivity level is not bloating your backlog and compounding delays. Customers expect a clear understanding of when their orders will be delivered, make sure you are taking action to support accuracy, including considering your resource pool and how they are allocated
• Average line length in stores: Unfortunately, some customers will abandon checking out in stores due to the line length alone. Are your stores staffed on your historically busiest days to maintain line lengths equal to or below an aligned measurement? If your lines are long, you may want to staff for more registers. If you don’t have additional stations available, can the additional staff “line bust” with mobile POS capabilities? Also, consider that returns typically take longer than a sale. Can you staff to manage a temporary returns line/station independent of your sales lines? Can you enable customers to ship POS pay and carry purchases to your fulfillment center(s) as they would an online return in order to limit the number of customers in line for a return and avoid adding additional staff? Don’t underestimate the value of short lines during busy periods.
• Online order pickup wait times: Customers will shop the way they are most comfortable. Many have realized that their In-store experience can be shortened while also avoiding shopping fees and shortening delivery times by completing Buy Online, Pickup In Store (BOPIS) transactions. However, if the wait for picking up their order exceeds their timing expectations, they may choose another retailer for pickup in the future. We often see a reduced priority in stores for “online transactions,” especially if they aren’t getting sales credit. It is important that we focus on the customer above any sales credit discussions as there will be no revenue to debate over if people don’t like to shop with you. If customers are waiting long periods for pickup, it may be time to consider staffing for pickup on high-volume days to minimize customer wait time and encourage repeat shopping.
• Customer care staffing: While you may aim to have very short to no wait periods throughout most of the year; that is often impractical at peak times as you would need to upskill sometimes 10x the number of people for a few days of demand. This would also mean those team members don’t have the reps in to make them truly great brand ambassadors for you. Ensuring you have simple self-service options for key use cases, alternative methods for contact during peak period, and reasonable expectations will be key to planning for success.
• DC staffing: Operating hours balanced with delivery SLAs, expected volume (incoming from suppliers as well as outgoing to your stores and direct to customers), and carrier pickup times are key to planning your DC labor well. Ensure you understand the mapping of this and where you had gaps, delays, and issues this year to capture these learnings for your 2025 planning. In future articles, we’ll take a deep-dive into other DC operations-related topics such as parcel forecasting.

At the end of the day, your operational challenges may, or may not require the support of additional staffing. What’s important is that you find the areas of opportunity and either automate, shift your operational approach, or staff to ensure your customer-impacting activities are as efficient as possible. Whatever your approach, ensuring you have a clear plan and have appropriate monitoring processes and owners in place will be key to your future success.

Organizational Change Management Needs

Now that you’ve taken input from the cross-functional teams, analyzed your areas of opportunity, and updated your roadmaps with new technology and/or process improvements to improve on last peak season’s performance, you need to ensure that the adoption, accurate usage, and participation in coming changes is supported by an intentional organizational change approach. Be sure you are communicating early and often that changes are coming, what they are, and when each change is planned. You should underline the value associated with these changes while also soliciting and acknowledging any hesitation or friction from your teams related to those coming changes.

If you aren’t already doing so, make sure you have identified Change Champions within affected areas who can help keep a pulse on how different business areas are reacting to change. By utilizing Change Champions, you can make sure team member voices are heard and that you create an environment where your teams feel like the changes are happening for them, not to them.

The more you can get the teams to contribute to the change and feel like they own it, the more likely they are to adopt it. Even with the best intentions, early communications, and collaboration, change takes time. It is important that you bake the appropriate change and adoption time into your calendar throughout the year. In addition, make sure to set up appropriate tools or methods to assess the effectiveness of change management efforts and catch issues early. Again, create an environment where your teams feel like they are participating in change and their thoughts are valued, not one where change is happening to them.

There’s a Lot to Consider…How Do I Get Started?

Now that you’ve come to the end of this article, I’m sure you have questions about how to get started, or you may need more details around specific recommendations. It is a lot to consume, and still feeling unsure is OK. Here are a few next steps that may help you fill in the gaps:

• Partner internally to align on any immediate actions that can be taken, like scheduling your peak retrospective.
• Engage a partner, like Summit Advisory Team, to leverage independent domain expertise to help guide you through some or all of the recommended areas to plan for your next peak season success.
• Stay tuned for more insights. Summit Advisory Team experts will be publishing additional articles that dive deeper into each specific topic in this article, providing more specific guidance and examples for your consideration and planning.

Good luck in the coming year, and in your future peak performance!