Peak 2026 – Part 2: Is your Peak plan adding resources or creating capacity?

More people don’t necessarily mean more output

Nobody wants to reach Peak and discover they’re short of people.

That can make operations understandably cautious, particularly when there are concerns about the availability of temporary labour.

We’ve seen what happens when that caution goes too far.

In one operation, our team recruited around 20% more Peak labour than ultimately required. That decision was partly influenced by warnings about how competitive the temporary labour market would become. The concern was that if the operation waited and needed more people later, they wouldn’t be available.

So the business protected itself.

Then the anticipated work didn’t materialise.

The lesson isn’t that you shouldn’t secure Peak labour early. Sometimes that is exactly the right decision.

But contingency has a cost.

You need to connect recruitment decisions to your demand scenarios, productivity assumptions and clear triggers for when additional labour is actually required.

And even when the volume does arrive, headcount isn’t the same as productive capacity.

If you recruit 100 temporary colleagues, how many will be fully trained when you need them? How quickly will they reach the productivity you’ve assumed? What happens to quality while they learn? Do you have enough experienced colleagues and team leaders to support them?

Then there’s an even more basic question.

Do you have enough equipment for them to do the work?

What else needs to increase when your headcount increases?

Adding labour creates requirements elsewhere in the operation.

More people might mean more PPTs and other MHE, more scanners, printers and devices, more batteries and charging capacity, more packing positions and more consumables.

It can also mean more leadership.

If your workforce increases significantly during Peak, particularly through temporary and less experienced colleagues, simply stretching your normal leadership structure across more people can create problems.

Team leaders spend more time coaching. Experienced colleagues get pulled away from productive work to answer questions. Training standards can slip. Quality can deteriorate. Safety becomes harder to manage.

So, if your labour plan says you need 20% more operational headcount, what else needs to increase to make those people productive?

That’s a much better test of capacity than headcount alone.

More stock can make your operation harder to run

You can see the same effect with inventory.

Building additional stock ahead of Peak can protect availability. But the fuller your warehouse becomes, the more your normal operating assumptions can start to change.

Putaway gets harder. Travel increases. Replenishment becomes more demanding. Congestion grows. Stock starts going wherever space can be found rather than where it’s most efficient to hold it.

At some point, extra inventory meant to protect customer service can start to reduce operational productivity.

We’ve seen teams respond to this in surprisingly simple ways.

In one operation facing significant space constraints, a putaway operator was paired with a picker. The picker helped identify available locations more quickly, while also tidying locations where possible as they moved through the warehouse.

It wasn’t a major investment. It was a change in operating method to deal with a constraint that became much more important as the building filled up.

That’s an important Peak principle.

The operating method that works for most of the year may not be the operating method you need at Peak.

Is your stock positioned for Peak?

It’s not just how much stock you’ve got. Where you put it matters too.

If you know certain products will move at much higher velocity during Peak, leaving them in their normal locations can create unnecessary travel, replenishment and handling.

We’ve seen high-velocity products moved into dedicated areas or temporary space close to packing so they can flow through the operation more efficiently.

That can create more useful capacity than simply adding people.

So when you review your inventory plan, don’t stop at storage capacity.

Ask whether your fast movers are positioned to support the rate at which you expect them to flow. Look at forward-pick capacity, replenishment requirements and travel as part of the same problem.

And think about what inbound is doing at the same time.

If inbound stock is consuming space, dock doors, MHE and people just as outbound reaches its busiest period, the two operations can start competing for the same resources.

On paper, you might have enough capacity for both.

In reality, you may not have enough capacity for both at the same time.

Peak isn’t business as usual with more people

This is where we think some Peak plans need challenging.

The assumption can be that the operation will essentially work as it normally does, just with more volume, more stock and more people.

Peak often needs different operating methods.

Could replenishment happen at different times? Should fast movers move location? Do receiving priorities need to change as outbound builds? Are different cut-offs required? What gets prioritised if volume exceeds plan? What happens when equipment fails, or a carrier can’t collect?

These aren’t decisions you want people making for the first time when the operation is already under pressure.

Your Peak operating methods need to be agreed and, where possible, tested beforehand.

That includes the processes themselves, but also the way you control the operation.

What are the Peak KPIs and thresholds? When do you move from normal operation to contingency? Who has the authority to make that call? What happens if absence rises, inbound arrives late, or a system goes down?

You don’t need a detailed plan for every possible event.

But your team does need to know when the original plan is no longer working and what happens next.

Test the connections, not just the individual plans

Most Peak-readiness plans already cover the obvious areas.

You’ll probably have plans for labour, inventory, space, equipment, systems, carriers and contingency.

The more useful exercise is to test the connections between them.

If you add people, do you have the training, leadership and equipment to make them productive?

If you add stock, do you have the space and replenishment capacity to keep it flowing?

If you change where stock is held, what does that do to travel, MHE and packing?

If outbound increases, what does that mean for inbound, the yard, despatch and carrier collections?

If the plan starts to fail, does everyone know who decides what happens next?

That’s where Peak capacity is really created.

Don’t confuse more resources with more capacity

There is a natural tendency in Peak planning to protect the operation by adding buffers.

More labour. More inventory. More equipment. More space. More transport.

Sometimes those buffers are exactly what you need.

But every buffer has a cost, and each creates additional demands elsewhere in the operation.

So don’t judge your Peak readiness by asking whether every workstream has secured enough resources.

Look at how those resources work together.

Can the people you’ve recruited reach the productivity you need? Can your leadership structure support them? Is there enough equipment to keep them working? Can your stock flow through the available space? Are your Peak processes different where they need to be? And can your management team recognise and respond when reality starts to diverge from the plan?

For Peak 2026, don’t just ask:

Have we added enough resources?

Ask:

Have we actually created the capacity we need?

Those aren’t always the same thing.

If you need an independent view of whether your Peak plan will deliver the capacity you expect, contact us. We can help you test how your people, stock, space, equipment and processes work together—and identify where changes could make the greatest difference.