During surge season, often coinciding with major holidays, many warehouse fulfillment operations become overwhelmed with demand. In peak times, warehouse traveling teams can bolster workforces when volume becomes too high, providing logistics, management, stocking, selecting, and shipping support when businesses need it most.
Even outside of surge season, traveling teams fill staffing gaps for order pickers and more in warehouse fulfillment operations to launch new products, overcome employee shortages, or handle other special events. This article reviews these benefits in detail to help warehouse managers prepare their operations for surge season without losing valuable uptime.
Why Does Surge Season Demand More Flexible Workforces?
Warehouse leaders must remain strategic and flexible during surge seasons, when demand is at its peak due to a seasonal change, holiday, or special event like the beginning of school. Surge season compresses the time that fulfillment teams have to organize, pick, and ship orders.
What Options are Available for Warehouse Managers to Meet Demand?
Surge season labor shortages can be patched using local temporary labor, but this comes with risks.
- Inconsistent training plagues local workforces, who may not be properly certified to operate warehouse machinery or experienced in similar fulfillment models.
- High turnover rates are common in local teams, whose members often are not fully invested in their organizations.
- Long ramp-up times can contradict the point of hiring temporary teams since surge season makes time a significant deployment factor.
- Less experienced temporary workers can cause stress to normal staff.
- Increased fulfillment errors can arise from personnel unfamiliar with the workflow, leading to slower pick rates and higher customer satisfaction issues.
This impact would be costly at any time of year, but during surge season, warehouse operators need a more strategic solution to their personnel shortages, one that can fill gaps with more qualified workers.
What are Traveling Warehouse Teams?
Rather than hiring generalized local labor teams, warehouse managers can prevent costly mistakes and retain their competitive edge during surge season by recruiting experienced traveling warehouse teams.
These strategically trained and qualified teams are often composed of certified workers, order selectors, order pickers, machine operators, and other fulfillment niches to fill workforce gaps with more experienced help. Rather than having to teach local labor forces how to operate in a warehouse environment, traveling warehouse teams are already acclimated to operating RF scanners, labelers, lift equipment, and management systems from day one.
By delivering work that is on par or even better than that of full-time fulfillment staff, warehouse traveling teams provide the ideal bridge between surge season and the rest of the year.
Benefits of Hiring Traveling Warehouse Order Pickers and Other Staff Roles
Compared to other sources of temporary labor, traveling warehouse staff can deliver several core benefits that help warehouse managers and fulfillment teams meet demand during surge season:
Industry Skill and Experience
Traveling warehouse teams do require training and certification, unlike general seasonal hires. They are already precertified and experienced in warehouse workflows and can therefore be inserted into existing fulfillment processes with little onboarding, safety training, software acclimation, or assistance.
→ Seamless skill integration is how traveling warehouse teams can scale up fulfillment labor capacity in hours instead of days or weeks, helping managers meet the tight delivery windows of the surge season.
Improved Pick Accuracy and Throughput
Increased error rates due to untrained, unfamiliar, or inexperienced temporary staff is a major pain point for most fulfilment operations during surge season. Traveling teams mitigate this risk with staff that reinforces the manager’s established fulfilment process, rather than work against it.
→ Even as volume surges, pick accuracy can be maintained or even increased despite also scaling throughput to match demand.
Improved Cost Efficiency Year-Round
When warehouse managers can rely on temporary skilled labor to keep up with throughput without increasing picking errors, they may not need as many staff members in the off-seasons. Rather than training and sustaining a large workforce that can also handle surge season, the traveling team can fill the gaps when needed while reducing the costs of sustaining idle labor in slower months.
→ Cost-effectiveness makes traveling warehouse teams a more scalable option for growing fulfillment operations, allowing managers to be flexible with their workforce to match the needs of their client volume.
Consistency Across Multiple Sites
Organizations that run multiple fulfillment facilities must maintain operational consistency, which means keeping the same safety standards, fulfillment processes, and practices between teams and locations. By utilizing traveling teams, managers can reduce variability across their sites without worrying about retraining staff or hiring inconsistent labor.
→ Multi-location consistency is core to the success of surge season fulfillment, as managers coordinate their efforts to meet demand, relying on the skills of their teams to reduce picking and shipping errors.
Rapid-Response Workforce Solutions Deliver Traveling Warehouse Order Pickers at a Moment’s Notice
Surge season calls for scalable and flexible labor that can be deployed in days, not weeks. The problem with local third-party labor is that it often leads to fulfillment issues due to unskilled, uncertified, or inexperienced workers adding stress, errors, and delays to an already tight fulfillment process.
At NVT Staffing Warehouse Division, our rapid-response warehouse staff provides trained traveling teams to strained warehouse staffing divisions, deployable within 72 hours of request. Our teams provide certified warehouse order pickers, operators, and more to make sure your operations can meet the demands of surge season without sacrificing your customer satisfaction standards in the process.
Contact the NVT team today to learn how our skilled fulfillment teams can meet your demand, no long-term contracts required.