January is an important month for warehouse operations and eCommerce businesses. In reality, it’s one of the best windows you get all year to make meaningful improvements in your warehouse.

In January, the chaos of peak is fresh in everyone’s mind. You still remember what went wrong, what slowed you down, and what nearly tipped you over the edge. But the volume usually drops just enough that you can actually do something about it.

If you want to set yourself up for a smoother year, the new year is the moment to step back, run a proper retrospective, and tighten the systems that keep your operation resilient.

Why peak season makes January so valuable

During peak, most teams are firefighting. You spot issues, you patch them, you move on. That’s not a criticism, it’s reality. When orders are flying in, you don’t have time to redesign workflows or rethink layouts. Even if you know exactly what’s wrong, the investment in time is too high when you’re just trying to get parcels out the door.

January changes that. You can look back with clearer eyes and ask, honestly:

• What did we learn from peak?
• Where did we lose time?
• Where did mistakes creep in?
• What were we relying on that we shouldn’t be relying on?
  
  

That last one matters more than most people realise. If a process only exists in someone’s head, it’s a single point of failure. Peak exposes that. The new year is the perfect time to fix it. 

Run a warehouse “fire drill” for operational resilience

Most businesses understand fire drills. Steps are written down, people know where to go, and you test it regularly so the process doesn’t fall apart when it matters.

Warehouses should do the same, not for safety, but for operational resilience.

At StoreFeeder, we came up with the idea of the five-minute warehouse drill. Imagine you drop someone into your warehouse with no prior knowledge. After five minutes, could they pick their first order? Could they find the right location, follow the process, and dispatch without needing someone glued to their side?

If the answer is no, that’s not a people problem. That’s a systems problem.

You can even score it. Something like:

• 1: They can’t do it without someone standing beside them
  
  
• 3: They could do it, but you’d expect mistakes
  
  
• 3: The system guides them step by step and prevents errors
  
  

Do that across a few key questions and you’ll quickly see where you’re relying on experience rather than process.

Don’t just aim for speed, aim for containment

A lot of warehouse optimisation conversations revolve around speed. Faster picking, faster packing, faster dispatch. That’s part of it, but it’s not the full story.

What really keeps a warehouse calm is not the absence of mistakes. It’s whether mistakes are contained.

Can someone do the wrong thing easily? If they pick the wrong item, will the system catch it early, or will it travel all the way to the customer before anyone notices?

Peak season is when “small” errors become expensive. The cost is not just reshipping. It’s customer service time, replacement stock, and the knock-on pressure it puts on your team.

The new year is a great time to look at where errors occured and why. Was it because similar items were stored next to each other? Was it because stock got put back in the wrong place and nobody recorded it? Was it because the process relied on someone remembering what to do?

If you can tighten the process so mistakes are caught early, everything else gets easier.

Do a proper retrospective, not a blame session

When I say “retrospective,” I don’t mean a meeting where everyone points fingers. I mean a structured review of what actually happened.

Start with the practical stuff. It’s often the simplest problems that cause the biggest delays.

• Did you run out of boxes, tape, courier labels, or mailing bags?
• Did your printer fail at the worst possible time?
• Did you have a backup printer, or did everything stop because one device stopped working?
• Did your Wi-Fi coverage hold up across the whole warehouse?
• Did you spend too much time hunting for stock?
  
  

Then move into process and layout.

• Did your foot traffic feel higher than it should have been?
• Were people walking the same routes repeatedly because of how you were picking?
• Were returns and exchanges manageable, or did they clog up your operation?
  
  

If your team relies heavily on paper at peak, January is the month to question that too. Paper can feel like control, because you can hold it, stack it, and see it. But it also creates failure points. If the printer dies, your process dies with it.

A subtle shift towards automation, scanners, and guided workflows can remove a surprising amount of friction.

Review returns with fresh eyes

Not every business gets hammered by returns in January; it depends on your vertical. But for many eCommerce retailers, returns are the second wave of peak.

January is a good time to ask:

• How fast did we process returns?
• How often did returns sit in a pile because nobody knew what to do with them?
• Did returned stock get restocked quickly, or did it disappear into limbo?
• Were we consistent about inspection and condition grading?
  
  

Returns are one of those processes where small improvements have a big impact. Clear steps, clear ownership, and good tracking turn returns from a headache into something manageable.

If you want one simple aim for January, it’s this: reduce the time between “return received” and “stock available again.”

Evaluate your courier performance

Peak doesn’t just test your warehouse. It tests your delivery partners too.

January is a sensible time to analyse courier performance while the experience is still fresh:

• Which couriers hit service levels?
• Where did delays happen?
• Were delivery issues isolated, or part of a pattern?
• Did claims spike?
• Did tracking updates match reality?
  
  

Courier performance can make your warehouse look bad even if you’ve done everything right. If you’re going into another year with the same partners, you want to do it with evidence, not hope.

Look at your channels and what “success” really meant

When people say “peak went well,” they often mean revenue was up. That’s one measure, but it’s not the only one that matters.

January is a good moment to define success properly:

• Did you sell the stock you intended to sell, or are you sitting on cash tied up in slow movers?
• Did you keep customers happy, or did service issues spike?
• Did you achieve the same output with fewer people than last year?
• Did your own website hit the KPIs you expected, or were you overly dependent on marketplaces?
  
  

A lot of businesses get a leg up through Amazon or eBay, then find themselves competing in a noisy space where it’s hard to build loyalty. Your defence is your brand, your website, and your customer experience. Now is the time to review whether you actually moved the needle there.

Make time for the important, not just the urgent

There’s an old idea I really like: urgent isn’t always important.

Warehouse teams live in the urgent. Orders need shipping, customers need answers, fires need putting out. You solve a problem, you feel productive, and you move on. There’s a dopamine hit to that.

But the important work is different. It’s quieter. It takes planning. It doesn’t always give you instant feedback.

Try to make space for the important work, the kind that stops you being in the same position next year.

That might be refining your workflows. It might be investing in better stock tracking. It might be moving away from processes that only work when experienced staff are on the floor. It might be setting up warehouse management software so the system guides people properly, rather than assuming they already know what to do.

The point isn’t to overhaul everything at once. It’s to make one or two improvements that pay you back for the next twelve months.

A practical new year checklist for your warehouse

If you want a simple way to approach your warehouse optimisation, here’s a sensible starting point:

• Run a warehouse drill: can a new starter pick an order in five minutes?
• Identify any processes that live in one person’s head and write them down
• Tighten error containment: catch mistakes before they reach customers
• Audit your consumables and create reorder triggers
• Review returns flow and reduce time to restock
• Evaluate courier performance and document what worked
• Analyse what “success” meant across channels, profit, and workload
• Pick one workflow to simplify with better systems or light automation
  
  

Subtle changes, consistently applied, are what future-proof a warehouse.

Closing thought

The reason the new year is such a good time to optimise is simple. The chaos of peak is still fresh, but you finally have the breathing room to act on it.

If you do nothing, you’ll drift into the year, carry the same inefficiencies, and hope next peak goes better. If you take January seriously, even just with a short retrospective and a few targeted fixes, you’ll feel the difference every single week that follows.

And if you need a reminder of what you’re aiming for, keep it simple: build a warehouse where the system supports the team, the process guides the work, and no single person is a point of failure.

That’s what good operations look like. 

If you would like to see how StoreFeeder’s warehouse management software empowers busy warehouse teams, drop me a message, and let’s chat.

Or get in touch for a demo, our team of experts in WMS and eCommerce are always on hand to show you how we can help your business overcome the same issues.
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Book a demo of StoreFeeder today.

Best of luck with refining your warehouse operations for the new year!

Brian Williamson- Founder & MD of StoreFeeder

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