Preparing for Peak Season With Tom Butt From Summit Advisory Team / Elevate

This week’s guest on Unboxing Logistics is Tom Butt, chief customer success officer at Summit Advisory Team and Elevate. 

In addition to being an expert in the shipping and logistics industry, Tom is an avid home chef. He compares peak season preparations to the cooking term “mise en place,” the process of organizing and arranging ingredients before preparing a meal. If ecommerce businesses practice “mis en place” with their shipping operations leading up to peak season, things will run a lot more smoothly. Listen to this week’s episode to learn how you can prepare your people, processes, and systems for the busiest time of 2023.

The peak season sprint

If the rest of the year is a jog, peak season is a sprint. Tom describes it as “stress testing your fulfillment and supply chain systems.” People, processes, technology, inventory, sales teams—all of them get pushed to the limit. 

Navigating carrier capacity challenges

Ecommerce businesses encounter lots of hurdles during the peak season. One of the most common? Carrier capacity. Whichever carrier(s) you work with, Tom recommends “communicating … to make sure that they’re aware of any volume spikes that you have.” If you don’t provide carriers with a reasonably accurate forecast, they might leave you high and dry when your shipping volume increases. 

In addition to keeping lines of communication open, it’s a good idea to consider working with multiple carriers. Tom’s advice is simple: “Diversify where you can.”

Preparing your team for peak season

People, processes, and systems are the backbone of a solid shipping and logistics operation. While all are critical, people play an especially important role in keeping things running during the busiest time of year. 

Tom and Lori discuss why it’s so critical to have the right people in the right roles and train them properly. You can level up your training process by starting at the top. “Make sure that you're training the trainers first, so you have champions, your supervisors, your managers. … They can evangelize how your operation works, the culture, and how you do things.”

Links

• Connect with Tom on LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/tombutt/ 
• Visit the Summit Advisory Team Site – https://summitadvisoryteam.com/ 
• Visit the Elevate Site – https://elevate.dev/