The holiday season is a crucial time for your business—and oftentimes one of the most stressful.

As demand skyrockets, it can be a struggle for even the most experienced business to keep their 3PL operations running smoothly. And, without the proper preparation, this can lead to missed deadlines, upset customers, and lost revenue.

To help you avoid this, we’ve identified the four most common holiday logistics pitfalls businesses fall into and, more importantly, how you can avoid them before the holiday rush begins.

Pitfall 1: Inventory Inaccuracies

During the holiday season, even small inventory errors can snowball into critical problems. Something as simple as unknowingly running out of stock or having your products misplaced in the warehouse can create major issues in your supply chain, leading to shipping delays, frustrated customers, and extra costs for your business.

Solution

With this in mind, it’s crucial to know exactly what you have, where, and how much. Before the peak holiday season hits, take a full physical inventory or cycle count of your products. As you do so, be sure to keep your warehouse management systems updated in real time and note exactly where products are located. It might also help to increase the frequency of cycle counts during the holiday period to keep stock levels accurate. This preparation helps mitigate any potentially damaging inventory inaccuracies later on.

Pitfall 2: Staffing Shortages and Training Issues

As your business picks up during the holiday season, your 3PL needs to have a reliable, effective workforce that understands your processes and can work efficiently. More often than not, relying on poorly trained seasonal workers or not having enough staff during this time will lead to slower processes and more mistakes—both of which can potentially cause costly errors and operational chaos down the line.

Solution

To combat this, it’s important for your 3PL to build a reliable staff early on and cross-train experienced staff to handle different functions in the operation. They should begin hiring seasonal employees well in advance to ensure they have time to be properly trained before the chaos of the holidays makes it impossible to do so—and have the flexibility to quickly reassign staff as needed.
It will be important that your 3PL understands that assigning simpler tasks, like picking and packing, to new employees, and ensuring that more experienced staff handle quality control or complex packaging processes will be key. This can help maintain accuracy and efficiency throughout the holiday season.

Pitfall 3: Carrier Capacity and Shipping Delays

Shipping plays a major role in the success of your holiday season. Likewise, if you fail to plan ahead, it can create a variety of issues for your business and customers. Carriers often experience problems with capacity during the holidays, meaning unprepared 3PLs and businesses can find themselves paying more for shipping or, worse, unable to ship products on time.

Solution

Again, planning ahead is key. Avoid extra costs and potential customer frustration by working with your 3PL and carriers early to optimize your shipping strategies. By planning and testing carriers in advance, you can avoid last-minute issues and delayed shipping. Be sure that you and your 3PL have backup plans in place in the event your primary carrier has any issues as well as verify that you have enough capacity on the carrier pickups—and don’t forget to test the backup plan.
It will also be important to set clear shipping deadlines for your customers. This will help manage expectations and ensure packages are received on time.

Pitfall 4: Sales and Operations Misalignment

Through the chaos of the holiday season, your team needs to constantly work together. If sales teams don’t communicate upcoming promotions with your 3PL operations, the warehouse may not be prepared for the influx of orders, causing shipping delays, product shortages, and missed opportunities for your business.

Solution

While important year-round, communication is especially crucial during the holiday season. Make sure your sales, operations, and supply chain teams are constantly communicating and remain on the same page throughout the holiday season. If there are products or bundles you know in advance will sell well and quickly, your 3PL should consider pre-packing them and making sure you have enough resources to handle the spike in demand. For example, BOGO or 50% off site-wide sales can have a drastic impact on operations, if the average units per order quickly increases.

Additionally, to ensure that shipping delays do not occur, it is critical that you also are aware of and have enough packaging to handle any larger-sized orders and enough staff to pick those types of orders.

The holiday season is a time of exceptional growth—and often a chaotic one for many businesses. However, by understanding and preparing for these four common holiday logistics pitfalls, you can ensure that your business stays on top of deadlines and ahead of customer expectations without the extra costs.

A successful holiday season turns new customers into repeat customers—which are critical to the long-term success of your business. So, don’t leave your holiday season to chance—download our free holiday logistics checklist to ensure your operations are ready for the rush.