Our CEO, Iain Coplans, wrote recently about why now isn’t the moment to change systems before peak on LinkedIn. This is the analytical version of that argument: what the peak-season visibility gap actually is, why it recurs so predictably, and what the correct response is once it’s named properly.
The observation
Every year, growing retail and wholesale businesses walk into Q4 with broadly the same operational setup that carried them comfortably through Q2 — and every year, a subset discover, in real time, that “comfortable” was conditional on volume staying inside a fairly narrow band. This tends to get treated as a staffing problem, or bad luck. It’s neither. It’s a textbook instance of what supply chain economics calls the bullwhip effect: small distortions in demand signal, order timing or stock visibility get amplified at every stage they pass through, so a modest and entirely normal seasonal spike in customer demand arrives at the warehouse looking like chaos.
The evidence at the top of the chain
This isn’t a small-business phenomenon. McKinsey’s most recent Global Supply Chain Leader Survey found that the share of companies reporting real visibility beyond their immediate suppliers has fallen for two years running, with confidence still short of where it stood in 2022 — despite sustained investment in systems and data. The businesses reporting this are not under-resourced. They are demonstrating, at scale, exactly what the bullwhip effect predicts: visibility degrades precisely when it is needed most, because the reporting cadences and thresholds built for average conditions were never designed to hold under variance.
The same mechanism, closer to the ground
At the retail and wholesale level, the same dynamic shows up in two distinct forms.
The first is operating leverage meeting fixed capacity. One operations team told us they need “an additional 2–4 packing stations during peak” simply to hold throughput steady. The constraint here isn’t ambition or headcount — it’s that peak volume finds the ceiling of a system sized for an average week, tested against a peak one.
The second is information asymmetry between a business and its own stock. Another business described going for four weeks with no real idea what was on the shelf, because their previous system couldn’t process backorders quickly enough to keep the picture current. A third has customers calling constantly to ask what’s on backorder, because the business itself can’t answer the question fast enough to get ahead of the call. In both cases, the real cost isn’t the stockout itself — it’s the lag between the event and anyone finding out about it, which is precisely the delay the bullwhip effect describes.
Why the obvious fix is the wrong one, right now
The textbook response to a bullwhip problem is not to rebuild the chain mid-cycle. Rebuilding under load is how a visibility problem turns into an outage. The correct response is to shorten the lag between signal and response wherever that’s cheaply possible now, and treat any structural fix as a separate decision, deliberately sequenced for after peak — not folded into the same three weeks you’re trying to survive. That’s the actual argument for treating the next few months as an audit months rather than a procurement month.
What the businesses pulling ahead are doing differently
Recent commentary on 2026 retail inventory strategy makes a point worth taking seriously: the retailers improving fastest here aren’t necessarily the ones spending the most on technology. They’re the ones who’ve moved inventory visibility out of being a single function’s KPI and made it something finance, customer service and operations are all genuinely accountable for — which is a governance change, not a technology purchase.
Where this goes next year
The four-week blind spot on backorders, the packing-station scramble, the constant “where’s my order” calls — all of it becomes data the moment peak ends. Most businesses let that data go cold instead of using it to shorten next year’s lag. AI Pro’s forecast-versus-actual tracking, and the demand-visibility work behind it, exists specifically to close that loop — so the gap McKinsey keeps finding at the top of global supply chains doesn’t have to keep reappearing at the bottom of yours, every single September.
This is not a pitch for this quarter, this is a conversation worth having in January, once this year’s numbers actually exist to analyse.