Retail shipper explains ins and outs of Peak Season preparation

The topic of Peak Season planning was cited fairly often at the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) Annual Conference late last month.

Even though Peak Season has been somewhat of a fluid term in recent years, with some years seeing very limited peak-related activity, especially in 2008 and 2009, when the recession was in full swing, and others seeing a more typical return to a traditional peak, which is how this year is being viewed by many industry stakeholders.

Reasons for that include an improving economy and better job numbers, as well as slowly rising consumer confidence. Other positives are seen in decent West Coast Port volumes and truck and rail tonnage, too. But even though those positive indicators do bode well for growth, a lack of wage growth still stands in the way of true economic growth.

Even with that imbalance, though, Peak Season appears to be in full swing, according to Rick Jackson, executive vice president of Columbus, Ohio-based Mast Global Logistics, a division of Limited Brands Inc.

“Those 14 weeks we plan for peak season is like ‘hair on fire’ and the challenges we run into that are similar to others are thinking about capacity infrastructure and that could be anywhere from having the right distribution centers in place to having your transportation lined up to making sure you are going to be able to move a product on time to labor to operate your distribution centers,” Jackson said at a CSCMP session.

And with Limited Brands being such a consumer-facing business at a time when e-commerce growth seemingly hits higher numbers by the day, Jackson said the peaks are beginning to spike even higher, due to the advent of social media and his company’s ability to reach its customers during Peak Season, which is when Limited Brands’ customers visit most, whether it is in a store location or online.

Regardless of how customers shop for the holidays, Jackson said that it results in what he called a “concentrated spike” during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which are 48 hours apart from each other.

“There is this tremendous ordering of product and a mountain of orders you need to pile through, and it continues to be a challenge for us in terms of how you prepare for that infrastructure with the axiom being ‘you don’t want to build a church for Easter Sunday,’ but we are seeing some challenges in that area,” he said.

Regardless of the time of year, though, Jackson stressed that speed is key for retail shippers.

“When you think about the retail business in its totality for all 52 weeks, we are in a business where speed is essential,” he explained. “We are in a fashion business and need speed to roll out new products, so when you have speed in your supply chain, it means you have less inventory and when you have speed you have quicker inventory turns. And what we are finding now is that we spend a lot of time looking at our model around how to anticipate disruption in your supply chain, and when you have a global supply chain like we do, where you are sourcing from around the world and literally delivering to retail footprints or customers around the world you might imagine that every day is a new day in terms of how we are thinking about that.”

In order to perform those tasks as efficiently as possible, Jackson said the Mast Global Logistics team has spent a lot of time keeping its eyes and ears to the ground to understand market conditions and trends.

“We are seeing challenges this year with ocean as a mode of transportation and we are always continuing to think about how we do prepare for how we are delivering the product,” he said.