Peak-Season Decisioning Prep

What's inside

Peak season compresses a quarter of operational decisions into a handful of weeks. The retailers who win it decided fast and consistently, not because they had the best forecast. This guide is an eight-week countdown to pre-wire the decisions that matter into peak, encoded as explainable, overridable rules.

• The peak decision map — what spikes for buying, allocation, transfers, replenishment and markdown, and exactly what it costs when each one is late.
• The eight-week countdown — a phased plan (Foundations, Pre-wiring, Lock & load) from week -8 to week -1, with a clear job for each week.
• Decision-by-decision prep — buying under cut-off pressure, first-allocation tiers, peak-velocity replenishment, inter-store transfers and a margin-protecting markdown plan.
• Autonomy & the war-room — which decisions earn guardrailed auto-execution for high-velocity days, who owns the thresholds, and how to monitor and escalate.
• A readiness checklist — including the store-threshold simulator at solya.app/resources to pressure-test your thresholds before you commit them.

Who it's for

Heads of operations and supply chain who own availability, working capital and sell-through through peak — and the merchandising and analytics partners who prepare alongside them.

Why it matters

At peak, the bottleneck is not visibility — it is decision latency, the gap between knowing and doing. A stock-out spotted on Friday and fixed on Tuesday is, for peak purposes, a stock-out you never fixed. Pre-wiring the decisions closes that gap, and fill-rate on the days that matter is where it pays off.