Black Friday, the pre-Christmas period and seasonal sales mean one thing for a warehouse: far more orders in less time. How do you prepare a warehouse for such a surge? Do you need a bigger team, or can good work organisation and the right WMS let you handle higher volumes without a proportional increase in headcount?
There is no single answer. In some warehouses extra staff will be essential. In others, organising processes, placing goods correctly, optimising picking or automating part of the operations can make a bigger difference. That’s why preparations for peak season are best started not with recruitment, but with an analysis of what actually limits your warehouse’s efficiency.
1. Start with data
Before you decide whether you need more staff, packing stations or another shift, check how the warehouse coped during previous periods of increased traffic.
It is worth analysing, among other things:
- the number of orders and their distribution throughout the day,
- peak hours,
- the products that appear most often in orders,
- the time needed for picking and packing,
- the number of errors and returns,
- the places where delays occur most often,
- the efficiency of each stage of the process – from order receipt to shipping,
- the use of available stations and resources during peak periods.
Data shows where the real bottleneck is. It may turn out that the problem is not the number of employees, but how work is organised, where goods are placed, or too many manual operations.
If the warehouse uses a WMS, much of this information can be taken straight from the system. Decisions about work organisation and resources can then be based on real data rather than just the expected growth in orders.
2. Prepare your storage locations
More orders also mean more movement around the warehouse. If the most frequently ordered products are in distant or hard-to-reach locations, every extra trip will add to order lead time. Before the season starts, it is worth analysing where goods are placed and checking that fast-moving products are in locations that allow efficient picking. Planning the replenishment of pick locations is just as important. An empty pick face at peak time can quickly become one of the main causes of downtime.
A well-organised warehouse map reduces unnecessary walking and makes better use of operators’ time. A WMS can also support location management and replenishment, so that operators have access to goods where they are actually needed.
3. Optimise picking
Picking often becomes one of the most heavily loaded processes during peak season. Before the busy period begins, check whether your picking method matches the profile of your orders. Depending on the warehouse, multi-picking, zone picking or smart task grouping can help. The way tasks are passed to operators also matters. If staff don’t have to work out where the next product is and in what order to pick it, they can spend more time actually fulfilling the order.
A WMS can support this process by pointing operators to specific tasks and locations and helping to organise the sequence of operations. With higher order volumes, a well-designed picking process can increase efficiency without a proportional increase in the number of people involved.
4. Don’t forget about packing
More orders mean more than just more picking. Packing can just as quickly become a bottleneck. Before the season, check whether you have enough packing stations, how picked orders are handed over, and how long checking, paperwork and preparing a shipment take. Carrier integrations also matter. Automatic data transfer and label generation can reduce manual work and speed up getting parcels ready for dispatch. It’s also worth checking that the individual stages of the process are properly synchronised. Faster picking won’t deliver the expected effect if picked orders then wait for packing or shipping.
5. Prepare your staff for a heavier workload
During busy periods, additional staff may be essential. That doesn’t mean a company has to keep a bigger team all year round – in many cases it’s enough to increase staffing temporarily for the peak. It is worth making sure, however, that new people can get started quickly. This applies not only to seasonal workers. At peak times some companies also bring in people who normally work in the back office to support the warehouse. In such cases it’s especially important that the system doesn’t require long, time-consuming training.
“At peak season there’s no time to spend days onboarding new people. That’s why the system should above all be intuitive and guide the operator through each task. In XWMS, users get specific instructions on what to do and where to go – in the Android version this is easy to tap through on a mobile device. As a result, they can start working independently almost immediately. This is especially important when people join the team who have never worked in a warehouse or normally do completely different jobs. Another important advantage is that XWMS is available in several languages, so people from abroad can also quickly find their way around the system and start working without a language barrier” – says Miłosz Gabiga, Specialist in the XWMS Implementation Team at EX7.
6. Check your systems and integrations
Rising order volumes are a challenge not only for the warehouse itself. Higher volume puts more load on the entire process – from placing the order, through the ERP and WMS, to handing the shipment over to the carrier. Before the season, check that all integrations work correctly and that the systems are ready for more transactions.
It is worth verifying, among other things:
- the flow of orders from the sales system,
- correct and smooth data exchange with external systems such as ERP and courier systems,
- label generation,
- correct stock level updates.
A failure or delay at any of these stages can quickly turn into problems with order fulfilment.
7. Test your warehouse before the season
The worst moment to find out whether processes work properly is the first day of Black Friday. Before the season, it’s worth running tests of the entire order fulfilment process – from the moment the order appears in the system, through picking and packing, to handing the shipment over for dispatch. This is a good time to identify problems that may be invisible under normal load but would quickly become a bottleneck with several times more orders.
If a seasonal increase in staff is planned, it’s also worth testing how the additional people work. This shows whether the processes and system really let them start quickly and don’t require extra, time-consuming steps.
Do more orders always mean a bigger team?
Not always – but sometimes extra people are simply needed. The key is that the decision to hire more should come from an analysis of the warehouse’s actual workload, not from the assumption that every increase in orders requires a proportional increase in staff. Well-placed goods, efficient picking, fewer manual operations, good packing organisation and access to data can significantly increase warehouse efficiency. And if the analysis shows that additional people are needed, a well-prepared system can make it easier to get them up to speed quickly.
This is where a WMS can play an important role – not only organising processes, but also supporting their optimisation, making better use of the existing team and allowing it to grow flexibly during periods of increased demand.
How does XWMS support the warehouse during busy periods?
XWMS supports key warehouse processes such as location management, order picking, operators working with mobile terminals, packing control and stocktaking. The system can also integrate with the solutions used at other stages of the process, including ERP, e-commerce and carrier systems.
Another important element during seasonal peaks is the ability to onboard additional people quickly. Guiding the operator intuitively through each task can shorten the time needed to prepare new employees for independent work. The availability of several language versions also makes work easier for people who don’t speak Polish. As a result, additional staff can provide real support at peak times without days of training on the system. Combined with well-designed processes, this allows the warehouse to scale its capacity flexibly when it is really needed.
Black Friday and the pre-Christmas period shouldn’t be the moment when you first start wondering whether your warehouse is ready for a heavier workload. It’s best to prepare in advance – based on data, process analysis and tests that show where additional resources are really needed and where it’s enough to make better use of the ones you already have.
