09/15/2026
Peak Season: Managing Your Operational Logistics
Following on from your product offerings and demand profiles, you need to get operational initiatives in place to allow for the ordering, management, and distribution of products during peak season.
Key takeaways
- A successful 3PL relationship relies on understanding who is responsible for specific activities within logistics and supply chain management.
- Critical success factors have an enormous influence on costs, customer satisfaction, and the efficiency of your logistics operations during peak season.
- Once you have your critical success factors in place, you need to be able to measure performance.
- Mobilizing your 3PL involves ordering up products, getting stock into warehouses, and ensuring your 3PL is ready to go.
- After getting your initial order levels and inventory in place, you will need to work with your 3PL to ensure smooth operations management including reordering, receiving goods, storage, fulfillment, and delivery.
This is the third of four articles on planning and navigating peak season with your third-party logistics provider. Part 1 covered establishing what you will sell, where, and to whom, and Part 2 covered demand profiles, inventory levels, and reordering. This article covers running the operation itself. Part 4 covers maintaining relationships and reviewing performance.
Manage operational logistics activities throughout peak season
Following on from your product offerings and demand profiles, you need to get operational initiatives in place to allow for the ordering, management, and distribution of products during peak season. You'll do this through:
- Establishing how responsibilities split between you and your 3PL for managing specific activities.
- Creating critical success factors for logistics performance, covering delivery time, cost, quality, and availability.
- Reviewing information gathering, reporting, and data for insight into operational logistics.
- Initiating peak season with your 3PL, placing product orders, and getting inventory and logistics processes in place.
Managing operational activities for the smooth flow, storage, reordering, and delivery of products.
1. Establish how responsibilities split between you and your 3PL for managing specific activities
A successful 3PL relationship relies on understanding who is responsible for specific activities within logistics and supply chain management. This step allows you to review all of your operational processes and assign responsibility for managing each one.
Establish the split of responsibility between you and your 3PL for the operational management of supply chain and logistics activities throughout peak season.
When to start: 12 months out.
What to consider
Understand the level of control that you want to have over logistics and supply chain management responsibilities. For example:
- Do you want to closely manage the logistics and supply chain with your business and primarily operate through directing your 3PL in specific ways?
- Do you want to take a more "hands-off" approach and transfer day-to-day logistics and supply chain activities to your 3PL?
Do you want an approach somewhere between the previous two, for example managing logistics forecasting and reordering internally but leaving everything else to the 3PL?
- Establish clear, immediate communications routes and integrations between your people and systems and those of your 3PL.
- Understand further communications routes and integrations between upstream and downstream suppliers and providers in your supply chain, and who has responsibility for them.
Review all operational processes for supply chain and logistics management and ensure there is a clear, documented agreement in place for which party manages which process.
Working with your 3PL
- Create a clear list of operational areas and processes for supply chain and logistics, together with the specific functions that you want to outsource to your 3PL.
- Talk to your 3PL about their approach, ability, and willingness to manage those specific operational supply chain and logistics processes on your behalf.
- Negotiate, create, and sign off formal documents and service level agreements that clearly define areas of responsibility and any other contractual obligations between you and your 3PL for operational process management.
- Revisit these agreements on a regular basis to ensure that all parties are meeting their commitments, and resolve issues if they are not.
2. Create critical success factors for logistics performance, covering delivery time, cost, quality, and availability
Critical success factors (CSFs) will represent how effectively your 3PL and supply chain are meeting your, and your consumers' needs. These CSFs have an enormous influence on costs, customer satisfaction, and the efficiency of your logistics operations during peak season.
Create critical success factors for 3PL performance.
When to start: six months out.
What to consider
Identify the most important consumer success factors:
- Availability of products across all marketplaces and channels.
- Delivery cost to the consumer.
- Speed of delivery to the consumer.
Quality of delivery to the consumer.
Identify the most important business success factors:
- Inventory levels and availability.
- Reordering and restocking cycle times.
- Fixed and per-item logistics costs throughout a product's lifecycle.
Impact of returns and reverse logistics.
- Convert each of these success factors into measurable KPIs.
Working with your 3PL
- Create a clear list of KPIs and agree them with your 3PL.
- Identify other information that your 3PL can provide.
- Establish measurement criteria and standards for each KPI including frequency of reporting, ownership of information, accuracy of data, and auditing of results.
Talk to GEODIS about how we can support your peak season. Get in touch with GEODIS.
3. Review information gathering, reporting, and data for insight into operational logistics
Once you have your critical success factors in place, you need to be able to measure performance. Work with your logistics provider to create one central "view of the truth" that consolidates and reports on information that's aligned to your success factors.
Review operational information management and monitoring of 3PL activities throughout peak season.
When to start: six months out.
What to consider
- Establish how you, your 3PL, and your upstream and downstream supply chain providers are going to share important information about logistics operations.
- Get a central view of all this information in one place and ensure it's updated regularly with the latest information on orders, inventory levels, demand, goods in transit, and any other information needed to manage the flow and availability of products during peak season.
- Review your critical success factors and define which of them can be turned into solid and reliable measures that can track performance.
- Create relevant measures, thresholds, benchmarks, analyses, and alerts to get immediate, consistent, and trustworthy reports on logistics metrics.
- Establish action plans to react to potential issues as highlighted in the data.
Working with your 3PL
- Understand the information that your 3PL is already collecting and how they gather, centralize, and report on data from stakeholders throughout the supply chain.
- Work with your 3PL to get relevant measurements in place, including realistic benchmarks, expected performance bands, and highlighting of potential issues.
- Create defined processes to identify issues and take action to bring logistics activities back in line with expected outcomes.
4. Initiate peak season with your 3PL, place product orders, and get inventory and logistics processes in place
Now that you've completed the prerequisites for peak season it's time to mobilize your 3PL. This involves ordering up products, getting stock into warehouses, and ensuring your 3PL is ready to go.
Initiate peak season with your 3PL.
When to start: three months out.
What to consider
- Finalize desired inventory levels based on forecasting, consumer demand, and other factors.
- Place orders yourself or work with your 3PL to place orders to ensure inventory arrives in time to meet demand.
- Continually review stock levels and lead times to meet changes in consumer demand or address delays in ordering or receiving products.
- Ensure active monitoring of all key areas.
- Review operational logistics processes including relevant triggers for specific activities like receiving consumer orders, fulfillment, distribution, reordering, and similar.
Establish control and remediation activities to allow for rapid problem resolution if there are logistics issues.
Working with your 3PL
- Ramp up the ordering process and ensure your 3PL receives enough products to meet peak season demands.
- Ensure that reordering thresholds, limits, and processes are in place.
- Actively monitor product demand and 3PL functions and throughput.
- Maintain required stock levels and ensure enough lead time for adequate reordering and availability.
- Identify key problem situations and ensure that you and your 3PL have appropriate issue mitigation activities to get things back on track.
5. Manage operational activities for the smooth flow, storage, reordering, and delivery of products
After getting your initial order levels and inventory in place, you will need to work with your 3PL to ensure smooth operations management including reordering, receiving goods, storage, fulfillment, and delivery.
Manage operational activities of peak season logistics with your 3PL.
When to start: one month out.
What to consider
- Review real-time, accurate data and forecasting regarding peak-season product supply, consumer demand, and logistics capacity.
- Ensure that all logistics activity KPIs are equal to or better than baseline, within acceptable thresholds, and not triggering alarms.
- Maintain active communications to ensure everything is running smoothly and to get early sight of potential issues.
Activate control and remediation activities if KPI reporting or communications with your logistics provider show issues with:
- Slow cycle times for reordering and receiving products.
- Difficulties maintaining inventory levels.
- Misalignment with consumer demands.
- Cost leakage or unexpected expenses.
- Inadequate capacity for storage or distribution.
- Slow deliveries.
Other issues with logistics functions.
Working with your 3PL
- Establish strong, daily, active communications channels with key points of contact in your business and your 3PL's organization.
- Regularly review the KPI information being shared by your 3PL.
- Audit and adjust your baseline, threshold, and alarm levels for KPIs.
- Get early sight if KPIs are likely to be breached.
- Maintain and activate remediation activities to bring problems back under control.
Previously in this series: Part 1, establishing your product offerings and requirements and Part 2, demand profiles, inventory levels, and reordering.
Next in this series: Part 4, maintaining relationships and reviewing performance through peak season, covering the review and control processes that keep the season running once it has started.