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Peak season moves quickly. Most teams stay focused on pushing orders out, managing exceptions in real time, and keeping operations stable during the holiday rush. Once volume normalizes, shipping analytics become easier to interpret. Carriers return to standard behavior, workflows stabilize, and performance patterns become clearer.
Peak season metrics often appear stronger than they truly are. Teams are fully staffed, communication is elevated, and leadership is closely monitoring performance. Every department is aligned on short-term goals and willing to put in extra effort to keep orders moving. That level of intensity can temporarily hide issues that increase cost or slow down shipments. Once the holiday rush ends, those patterns are easier to identify, revealing the true health of your shipping operations.
This applies across large ERP driven shipping environments and to mid-market operations that rely on a WMS or standalone parcel tools. Whether you move fifty thousand holiday parcels or manage steady B2B freight, the post peak season period provides the most accurate view of supply chain performance.
With that clarity, several meaningful supply chain data insights begin to emerge.
5 Shipping Insights Worth Examining After Peak Season
1. On-time performance
During peak season, teams often add labor, intervene manually, and coordinate closely with carriers to maintain service levels. These conditions can artificially inflate performance.
Once the holiday surge ends and day-to-day workflows stabilize, on time performance reveals its true baseline. Useful indicators include:
- On-time delivery by service level
- Performance by region or lane
- Carrier consistency over multiple cycles
- First-attempt delivery success
Evaluating these metrics after peak season helps distinguish performance issues driven by temporary volume spikes from issues rooted in routing logic, carrier selection, or service alignment.
2. Cost drivers and surcharges
Many of the peak-season cost impacts do not appear instantly. They show up during carrier billing and invoice reconciliation. As a result, the period after the holiday rush is often the first-time shippers can see the true financial effect of peak volume.
Recurring patterns include:
- DIM weight corrections
- Additional handling fees
- Delivery area and residential surcharges
- Oversized or heavy package fees
- Variances between quoted and billed transportation costs
These insights help identify SKUs that require dimensional updates, packaging that needs refinement, and carrier services that consistently generate unexpected adjustments.
3. Exception trends
Exception data is easily distorted by peak season volume and staffing adjustments. Once operations settle, exception trends reveal upstream issues that affect speed, accuracy, and cost.
Common patterns include:
- Address quality issues
Clusters of address corrections or failed first delivery attempts often reveal gaps in order entry workflows, ecommerce integrations, or customer data quality. - Customer not available
High rates in certain regions may point to poor delivery timing, insufficient notifications, or mismatched service levels. - Damages and packaging failures
These highlight where certain SKUs require stronger packaging guidelines or improved cartonization logic. - Misroutes and carrier handoff errors
These usually trace back to system formatting differences or data inconsistencies across
Reviewing exceptions after peak season allows teams to address root causes instead of reacting to individual shipments.
4. Carrier performance
Peak season affects each carrier differently. Network congestion, regional surges, weather, and capacity limits often create temporary performance swings. That makes it difficult to compare carriers fairly during the holiday rush.
The post-peak season offers a more stable foundation for evaluating:
- Transit reliability
- True cost per order
- Performance by service type
- Regional or lane level consistency
- Frequency of billing adjustments
These insights support more accurate routing rules, stronger carrier negotiations, and better volume distribution across your network.
5. Packaging and cartonization
During peak season, packaging decisions often prioritize speed and inventory availability. Once the holiday surge ends, the impact of those decisions becomes clear.
Issues typically identified include:
- Repeated DIM corrections for specific SKUs
- Oversized boxes used more often than needed
- Configurations that triggered additional handling fees
- Damage-related returns tied to packaging choices
Reviewing SKU level patterns after peak season helps improve cartonization, update dimensional data, and refine packaging guidelines that support both cost savings and more sustainable shipping.
How ShipERP helps teams act on post-peak season insights
For many organizations, the challenge is not just collecting data. The challenge is connecting it. Shipment data is often stored in one system, tracking updates come from carriers, exceptions are logged elsewhere, and invoices arrive later from multiple sources. Without a unified view, reviewing post peak season performance becomes a manual, time consuming process.
ShipERP brings these data points together so teams can evaluate performance clearly and act with confidence. With a single environment for rating, tracking, exceptions, invoices, and analytics, shippers can move beyond spreadsheet driven analysis and transform post peak season insights into meaningful improvements.
With ShipERP, you can:
- Compare expected vs billed costs at scale
- Identify recurring exception categories
- Measure carrier performance across lanes and services
- Trace packaging and DIM issues back to specific SKUs
- Automate routing and exception handling rules based on real data
Turn post peak season insights into year-round performance gains
Peak season reveals how hard your network can work. The period after the rush reveals how well it performs. If your post-peak season review still lives across scattered reports, manual spreadsheets, or siloed data sources, there is untapped value waiting to be captured.
A more unified view of your shipping data can reduce costs, strengthen carrier partnerships, and improve customer experience long before the next wave of high demand.
If you are ready to turn post peak season insights into long term operational improvements, ShipERP can help you unify your data and turn insight into action.
