Getting Ready for Peak Season: How to Set Up Your ERP Before Black Friday and Christmas

Is your inventory management hitting its limit during peak season? 3 levers make the difference 

Same story every year: Black Friday approaches, the team comes under pressure, temp staff gets hired at short notice. That means onboarding time, a higher error rate, and costs that only show up on the books in January. The systematic unpreparedness of your ERP is what really hurts then.

Three levers make the difference between “stable processes” and “everything on fire”:

• Inventory planning for your biggest-revenue season using historical ERP data
• Workflow automation for the critical peak processes
• AI agents for the customer service overflow

We'll tell you exactly what to do and when to automate seasonal peaks in e-commerce. Once you've set it up properly, it replicates your e-commerce automation every year before Black Friday in a few clicks.

8 weeks before Black Friday: inventory planning with historical ERP data 

Your ERP has all the data you need to plan for the seasonal business. You just have to use it.

Analyze last year's data 

Under Reporting, open the revenue analysis, set the period to October through December, and compare it to the same period last year. Filter by the product perspective, and you'll see which products overperformed during peak season. This analysis takes under two hours and forms the basis for everything that follows.

Update your ABC analysis 

Not every product deserves the same buffer. The inventory analysis under Reporting classifies your products automatically: A products make up 80% of your revenue, B products 16%, C products the remaining 4%. You don't need to trigger the analysis, it's already on the dashboard.

One thing to know before you rely on it: the inventory analysis calculates using data from the day the dashboard was activated for your instance. If you're only turning it on now, you won't have a basis for a year-over-year comparison yet. In that case, work with the revenue analysis instead, and turn the dashboard on now so you have the history next year.

For A products: raise minimum stock levels now. If you want a real buffer, hold it via a separate warehouse or a replenishment storage location, or hold back a fixed quantity per sales channel using a pseudo-stock formula.

Activate reorder suggestions 

Instead of manually raising the minimum stock level for the season, you can let Xentral run it for you. In the Advanced Reorder Suggestion module, activate dynamic minimum-stock calculation. Xentral then calculates, every night, the average demand of recent days times your default supplier's lead time. If sales pick up in November, the reorder threshold moves up with it.

Important to understand: this is a rolling average, not a seasonal forecast. It reacts to the increase but doesn't predict it. For the hard jump at Black Friday, you'll also want to use the period as a calculation basis: via the "Past orders" basis, Xentral calculates demand from completed orders in last year's equivalent period.

4 weeks before Black Friday: switching workflows into peak mode 

Four weeks before Black Friday is the moment to configure things like shipping automation in your ERP or a dunning pause. Anything not set up now gets done manually during peak season instead.

Workflow 1: shipping label automation at maximum speed 

In normal operation, a manual step between pick & pack and printing the shipping label sounds like a minor thing. Someone finishes the pick, switches into the system, triggers the label print, maybe 30 seconds per order.

On Black Friday, with 500 orders, that's four hours your team spends every day carrying out a step the ERP can just as easily do itself. And that's just one process among many that come under pressure at the same time during peak season.

You don't need a workflow for this, Logistics in Xentral can do it on its own. Two approaches, depending on your warehouse:

At the packing station, set up the shipping center so the label screen gets skipped. The shipping label then prints directly as soon as the order is scanned. That's one step fewer per parcel, with no one clicking anything.

For similar orders, you can go further: batch printing of shipping labels checks all orders against a picklist profile, moves the matching ones into picklists, and after the process starter runs, prints all labels on the label printer, with a start and end label for verification. If a label fails, Xentral automatically creates an issue ticket in the shipping center so nothing gets silently stuck.

This process is directly activatable in the Xentral Workflow Library. If you also want to build in specific carriers or channel-dependent logic, you can do that in the Flow Editor.

Workflow 2: pausing dunning during peak weeks 

A dunning notice goes out to a customer who made a €300 purchase two days earlier. Customer service gets an angry reply, and the team has to respond, right in the middle of peak season when capacity is already stretched thin.

The period between mid-November and early January is the worst possible time for accounts receivable management. Customers are in a buying mood, and payment delays are usually caused by higher order volume, not unwillingness to pay.

The fix lies in the dunning process itself. The dunning run doesn't start on its own: it either runs via the Dunning process starter at fixed times, or only when someone clicks "Start dunning." For peak weeks, remove the times from the process starter; Xentral keeps calculating in the background but sends nothing.

Two adjustments are worth making alongside that: in Settings, extend the dunning deadlines per stage for the peak period. And for individual invoices you definitely don't want to dun, block them directly in the dunning overview from further processing.

One thing stays manual: after peak, you reset the process starter to the old times. Put a calendar reminder on January 10th for that. It's the one manual step nobody can take off your hands, and it takes a minute.

Workflow 3: out-of-stock alert for top sellers 

The third workflow addresses a problem that's especially painful during peak season: an A product sells out, but nobody notices in time. Purchasing finds out because someone happens to check the warehouse, or because customers start cancelling orders.

The problem is a lack of visibility. During peak season, nobody has time to manually go through stock lists every day.

Xentral gives you two ways to handle this, and during peak season, both are worth using.

First, the Reorder Suggestion Email app from the App Center. It sends the reorder suggestion to purchasing on a schedule, including the shortfall against the minimum stock level per product. Once a week is enough in normal operation; for peak, set the process starter to daily. That way, the list lands in the inbox instead of someone having to go get it.

Second, the inventory analysis. The Low Stock KPI flags products as at risk once stock no longer covers 95% of weekly sales volume, and calculates the potential lost revenue alongside it. That's the view your purchasing team should have open every morning during peak weeks.

None of these levers need extra software, they're built into Xentral. If you want to automate your own workflows beyond that, Xentral Flows is available on every plan, with around 70 pre-built workflow types from the library. For custom flows you need the Flow Editor, currently in beta. Note that every workflow execution beyond the fair-usage volume included in your plan is billed separately.

1 week before Black Friday: activating AI agents for customer service during peak season 

Peak brings more customer inquiries: “Where's my package?”, “Can I still exchange this?”, “When will it arrive?”

This overflow is the most common reason teams hire temp staff at short notice, with everything that comes with it: onboarding, error rate, coordination overhead.

In the Xentral Agent Hub, several AI agents pre-process your email inbox. Two of them carry the biggest load during peak season:

Delivery-status agent: incoming shipping-status inquiries are automatically detected. The agent reads the relevant information from the message (order number, customer data, carrier), matches it against the data in Xentral, and creates a summary with a recommended action. Your team sees what needs to happen, without manually looking up every inquiry.

Returns agent: it reads customer data, order number, affected products, reason for the complaint, and any uploaded images from the customer's message. It then checks your configured return and complaint deadlines and the knowledge from your knowledge base, and suggests the next step: initiate a return, exchange, or replacement delivery. It recognizes existing returns and credit notes and so prevents duplicates. If no rule applies, you get a notification with a recommended action.

The agent prepares, the human decides. No autonomous action without oversight, but also no manual searching for information, which costs valuable minutes during peak season.

Budget more than a week for this. The Agent Hub works via a forwarding rule: you forward an inbox, for example returns@ or support@, to your Agent Hub instance's address, and set up a sending account in Xentral for the replies.

For that you need the right permissions and a well-maintained knowledge base with communication style, product knowledge, and return rules on file. Without that foundation, the agents won't produce usable suggestions.

A week before peak comes the test run: run sample inquiries through and brief your team on the different process. Start with one clearly scoped inbox and expand later.

For an overview of all available AI features in Xentral, see our AI overview page.

ROI comparison: temp staff vs. ERP configuration 

The following comparison is a cost example for a retail business with an order volume of around 200 orders a day during peak season, hiring two additional temp staff for six weeks for the peak.

On the other side is the effort of preparing your ERP for peak season once. What's included in your plan and what needs an add-on module depends on your setup. Advanced Reorder Suggestion and the Reorder Suggestion Email app are their own building blocks, and workflow executions in Xentral Flows are billed beyond the fair-usage volume included in your plan. Check that with your account contact once, and you'll have the full picture.

Because the actual goal of peak-season preparation is precisely the ability to double or triple your order volume without needing extra staff.

Checklist for preparing your ERP for peak season: what to do when 

✅ 8 weeks before peak 

• Analyze last year's October–December data in the ERP

• Update the ABC analysis and identify A products

• Raise minimum stock levels for top sellers

• Activate reorder suggestions with a seasonality factor

• Set up safety buffers for A products via a separate warehouse, replenishment location, or pseudo-stock figures

✅ 4 weeks before peak 

• Set the shipping label workflow to trigger automatically after pick & pack

• Configure the out-of-stock alert workflow for top sellers

• Pause dunning for peak weeks: remove times from the process starter, extend dunning deadlines

• Increase channel-specific stock buffers via pseudo-stock formulas

• Double-check: does the shipping label print automatically? Does the reorder suggestion arrive by email? Is the dunning run paused?

✅ 1 week before peak 

• Activate AI agents and run a test with sample inquiries

• Update delivery-time display in the shop

• Brief your team on the different processes and new workflows

• Define escalation paths for edge cases

✅ After peak 

• Reset the dunning process starter to normal times, release blocked invoices

• Reset stock buffers to normal values

• Document peak data: which SKUs overperformed? Where were the bottlenecks?

• Save the setup for next year

Conclusion: peak season is plannable, and it can get better every year 

Start 8 weeks ahead, and you can get through peak season without temp staff and close out January 1st cleanly. The setup works like a playbook that improves every year, because this peak's data becomes the foundation for the next one.