Numina Group Blog

How to Optimize Your Warehouse to Improve Peak Season Performance and Prepare for a Successful Automation Project

Jen Maloney

October 3, 2024

Despite the uncertainty brought on by inflation, labor shortages, and a potential recession, this year’s peak holiday shopping season is still expected to be robust as consumers continue to look forward to the holidays. This year’s peak season could offer your business an opportunity for growth if you’re ready.

Gartner suggests that preparing in advance by developing a solid omnichannel fulfillment strategy is essential to success. By taking a proactive approach, you can optimize your operations in advance to ensure a smoother, more profitable fourth quarter.

Retailers need to optimize their fulfillment workflows for efficient picking, packing, and shipping processes to handle the rapid surge in omnichannel order volumes in peak season. Warehouse automation can also help to manage the complexities of fulfilling orders across multiple channels, ensuring speed, accuracy, and scalability.

It may be too late to fully optimize your distribution center with new automation technologies before the holiday peak, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take meaningful steps now. As a first step, closely track bottlenecks in your operations, such as delays or order inaccuracies, to identify areas for improvement and ensure the following year runs more smoothly.

By observing and documenting these pain points, you will be well-prepared for what needs to be automated or streamlined for current operations and ready to identify and implement warehouse technologies to improve future growth.

Learn About Numina Group’s Warehouse Optimization Services

How to Prepare Your Distribution Center for Peak Season

Based on Numina Group’s experience in thousands of warehouses throughout North America, here are some suggestions that you can act on now to ease tension during peak season. Our warehouse experts can also assist you in optimizing your distribution and ensuring successful deliveries.

Evaluate Slotting Processes: Analyze SKU movement and optimize storage to reduce pickers’ travel time. Consider batch picking for high-demand products to increase efficiency.
Lean Up Packing Operations: Pre-make and stage popular carton sizes to eliminate packing delays and improve throughput.
Limit Congestion: Implement frequent replenishment to avoid workflow obstructions and ensure temporary workers can navigate the space efficiently.
Calculate Staffing Needs: Plan seasonal hiring early and allow ample training time so your best employees can focus on critical tasks during peak season.
Update and Streamline Staff Training with Automation: Voice-directed picking systems, like Numina’s Victory Voice™, accelerate training and onboarding by enabling hands-free, voice-guided tasks, increasing picking speed and accuracy with minimal training.
Preventive Maintenance and Spare Parts Management: Conduct a systems audit and stock up on essential spare parts to prevent costly downtime.
Plan for the Future: After the peak season, audit your operations and identify bottlenecks. Investing in automation solutions for the long term, such as voice-picking technology, mobile robots, and RDS™ Warehouse Execution and Control Software platform, will streamline your processes and reduce labor dependence year-round.

Numina Group will work closely with your company to review, compare, and select the right blend of process improvements and the best warehouse automation technology to optimize order fulfillment operations.