Six Weeks to Secure Your Peak: Optimise Your Team for Peak Trading Success

Peak trading doesn’t arrive overnight; it ramps up. By late November, order volumes and customer expectations hit full throttle. But the real deadline is sooner: there’s a six-week window to get ahead of potential issues before they’re too baked in to fix without disruption. 

This window is where leaders deeply understand the situation and risk of failure, or turn a blind eye to limitations and hope for the best. A few focused conversations now can save frantic calls for extra labour, emergency repairs or customer appeasement later. 

The behavioural blind spots 

Operations don’t go off track just because of dire forecasts or broken kit. They wobble because people, with the best intentions, get trapped in these patterns: 

• Optimism bias: believing small concerns will settle on their own 
• Ownership and pride: hesitating to escalate or invite outside input (“we should handle this”) 
• Embarrassment or self-sabotage: rejecting helpful suggestions because they sting (“why didn’t we think of that sooner?”) 
• Normalising the niggles: treating overtime, workarounds and slip-ups as “just how peak works” 

Naming these behaviours helps teams see them for what they are: natural, but risky if left unchecked. 

Operational symptoms to watch 

Look beyond headline KPIs and check for early tremors: 

• Maintenance jobs delayed to “keep things moving” 
• Agency or seasonal staff left to learn on the fly, whilst recruitment still continues at pace 
• Small SLA breaches smoothed over rather than analysed 
• Capacity models untested against higher-than-expected demand or staff absence 
• Different teams holding parts of the picture but not joining the dots 

These are not just technical gaps; they’re often signs that people feel pressure to look fine instead of speak up. 

How resilient operations behave 

The businesses that sail through peak don’t simply have better processes; they create space for candid conversations and early action: 

• They revisit last year’s lessons and act on them 
• They stress test assumptions (“what if orders jump 20%?”) 
• They invite cross-functional voices to surface weak spots 
• They call in extra perspective before the crunch, not during it 

It’s about shifting the culture from “cope later” to “prepare now.” 

Hatmill’s role and approach 

Our work in crisis prevention and recovery has shown how decisive early steps can be. We bring calm structure, rapid diagnostics and on-the-ground support to stabilise operations and, just as importantly, we help leaders stay out of the recovery zone altogether. Acting as an impartial voice in the room, we bridge the gap between head-office teams and operational sites, or between internal supply-chain teams and external partners. By cutting through bias and assumptions, we steer conversations toward the real sources of friction so everyone can focus on solutions.

Whether it’s a quick health check, stress testing capacity or strengthening onboarding, we help you make changes while there’s still time to lock in success. 

Proof our approach works 

Last year we were asked to support an operation preparing for peak after a major step-up in pallet volumes. A rapid rollout of a new site meant fulfilment and stock accuracy were well below target just twelve weeks before Christmas. 

We worked with the teams on both sides of the handover, using data and workshops to uncover the real blockers. A key issue was a misalignment between warehouse and ERP systems that left half of SKUs mismatched, while short-term firefighting meant forecasting and migration planning weren’t getting the attention they needed. 

By treating the run-in to peak as a single programme of work, standing up clear governance, aligning KPIs and co-ordinating senior input, we helped focus effort where it mattered. Order fulfilment rose from 75% six weeks out to 94% in peak week, and stock reconciliation between systems improved from 50% to 93%. The lesson was clear: structured attention on the right levers, even late in the season, can turn a pressured peak into a controlled one. 

We also recently stepped into an operation where service levels were slipping badly and backlogs were building. The team had become absorbed in day-to-day firefighting, convinced that only today’s fires mattered. As a result, an underlying issue sat hidden in plain sight: more than 80,000 units were sitting in the system as “orderable” but were actually not processable. They were tied up in returns, damages and back-to-stock queues, or locked by a status that meant they couldn’t be picked. Every day’s scramble for capacity only added to the pile, and this was resulting in cycling orders coming back into the system due to the mismatch of stock status. 

By taking a step back, we were able to pinpoint and correct the blockage, releasing that stock into the flow. Within six weeks, the proportion of orders fulfilled by Day 5 jumped from 77% to 96%, and daily pick volumes climbed by 50%. The shift wasn’t just about process; it was about focus, and aligning people on the real levers rather than chasing symptoms. 

It shows how, when performance wobbles, clarity and targeted effort can move the dial quickly, but only if you are prepared to pause the firefight and surface the root causes. 

Final thought 

Peak trading rewards preparation and punishes delay. You have a clear six-week horizon where thoughtful action beats heroics. Start the conversations, surface the concerns and make the improvements that will let your people, and your customers, enjoy a confident, controlled peak. 

If you want to identify your risks and opportunities before the peak trading period, contact Hatmill now to avoid last-minute issues.