Peak Season Warehouse Capacity Planning: The Dock Reality

The Arithmetic of Q4 Doesn't Change

Q4 hits and the inbound manifests look the same every year. Volume climbs 35 to 40 percent over baseline. Drayage providers tighten their windows because Port of Montreal container free-time policies mean detention charges kick in faster. Your importers panic and push inbound harder. And your dock doors, racking, and staff are the same physical resources they were in September.

Most importers don't think about warehouse capacity until mid-October, when their broker tells them there's a 10-day CBSA exam queue and their product is stuck at the sufferance warehouse. By then, capacity planning is damage control, not strategy.

The Four Constraints That Actually Matter

Dock-door throughput is the first choke point. A 40,000 square foot sufferance warehouse might have 7 dock doors. If each dock door handles one FTL inbound and one outbound per day, you're looking at 3.5 inbound slots and 3.5 outbound slots daily. On paper that's 17.5 inbound doors per week. Q4 reality? Exam containers add 2 to 3 extra days of hold on the dock. A container flagged for examination doesn't move to racking while the CBSA inspector schedules it. So an exam-held container occupies your dock space longer, reducing the number of new arrivals you can accept behind it.

Racking density is the second constraint. A typical Montreal 3PL uses adjustable pallet racking with 8 or 9 beam levels. If your beams are rated for 3,000 lbs distributed load, you're stacking 2 pallets high on a single-pallet footprint. Two-pallet-deep racking means 4 pallets per location. If each pallet is 48 inches by 40 inches and takes up one location, your density per bay is tight. Add 30, 40, or 50 percent volume and you're shuffling SKUs between locations to make room for new inbound. That's pick-pack cycle time lost to slotting work.

Drayage window stacking is the third constraint. Port of Montreal operates container free time policies that vary by terminal and operator. Once free time expires, detention charges apply. Most importers expect their drayage to be available within 24 to 48 hours of customs release. If 15 importers all get released on the same Thursday afternoon and all want drayage on Friday morning, your drayage provider has a bottleneck. You're either waiting for Monday or paying detention premium rates. FENGYE LOGISTICS coordinates with regular drayage partners to negotiate weekend and evening windows during Q4, but that requires planning in August, not October.

Cross-dock cutoff timing is the fourth constraint. If your cross-dock operation ships outbound at 14:00 daily, inbound that arrives after 10:00 doesn't make today's truck. It sits overnight at your in/out rate, typically $40 to $60 per skid depending on handling. A 20-pallet inbound arriving at 13:00 on a Wednesday costs your importer $800 to $1,200 in overnight warehouse fees if it misses the 14:00 cutoff. During Q4, when inbound volumes are heavy and drayage is unpredictable, the gap between on-time and just-late grows wider.

How FENGYE LOGISTICS Sized Inbound for Q4

Planning for peak season capacity starts in August. We audit our dock-door calendar and identify which importers are predictable and which are volatile. Predictable means they release containers on a consistent day and take drayage within 24 hours. Volatile means they hold product while deciding which warehouse location to send the next shipment to, or they release on Thursday and don't want drayage until Tuesday.

We ask every importer: what's your projected Q4 volume, in pallets per week? Not a guess. A forecast tied to their sales cycle. Once we have that, we calculate the dock-door slots we need per week. A 40-pallet inbound is 1 FTL or 2 LTL trucks. Two FTL arrivals per week per importer, plus exam holds and cross-dock pushes, means we need 5 to 6 dock doors reserved just for their account if they're sending 80 pallets per week.

Racking is next. We map out which SKUs are staying in-bond and which are exiting to domestic bonded locations or to the customer directly. In-bond SKUs take permanent slot allocations. Domestic exiting SKUs can use overflow or transient racking because they leave within 48 hours of release. That distinction lets us squeeze another 15 to 20 percent capacity out of the same square footage, because we're not dedicating premium-location real estate to pallets that ship the next day.

Drayage window negotiations happen in August and September. We tell our carriers: we're projecting 200 additional inbound pallets per week in Q4. We need Friday evening and Saturday morning slots to absorb the Wednesday and Thursday releases. We need to offer importers a 48-hour window from release to delivery. Without that, detention charges and overnight warehouse fees become the customer's real cost, and they blame the warehouse.

Cross-dock cutoffs get tighter during peak season, not looser. We move the cutoff from 14:00 to 12:00 in November and December. That gives us a 2-hour buffer to stage outbound and lets inbound that arrives between 12:00 and 14:00 flow into the next available outbound slot, usually the following day. It's not perfect, but it prevents the avalanche of overnight fees that hit when cutoff timing is loose.

The Numbers That Matter

Q4 inbound typically increases 35 to 40 percent above September baseline. If September sees 500 pallets per week, October climbs to 675, November to 700 or higher. That's not a linear curve. It's a surge that hits mid-October and flattens in early December when most retailers have received their holiday stock.

Dock-door utilization during baseline is about 60 percent. During peak season, you're hitting 85 to 90 percent. At 90 percent, you have almost no buffer for exam holds or missed drayage windows. A single 10-pallet inbound arriving earlier than expected can cascade delays across three other scheduled arrivals.

Racking density peaks at about 75 to 80 percent of total usable cube during Q4. Go beyond 80 percent and you're creating pick-pack congestion. Staff can't navigate the aisles, and putaway cycle time doubles. A pallet that should slot in 15 minutes takes 30 because there's no clear path to the assigned location.

The Planning Question You Should Ask

Most importers don't ask their warehouse one question that actually matters: what's your maximum weekly inbound volume without degrading cross-dock cutoff compliance? That number is real. At FENGYE LOGISTICS, it's about 180 pallets per week (4 FTL equivalents) across all customers combined while holding a 98 percent cutoff-compliance rate. Above that, we're moving pallets to overnight holding or pushing them to the next available cross-dock window.

If your importer forecasts 200 pallets per week in Q4, that doesn't fit in a single warehouse location without a supporting agreement on overnight fees or alternate drayage timing. It's not a penalty. It's physics.

Capacity planning done right means negotiating these constraints in real time with your importers in August. Not reactive hand-waving when October manifests arrive. The 3PL that sits down with 10 importers in August and sizes each one's Q4 inbound against available dock doors, racking, and drayage windows doesn't get caught in the Q4 crunch. The one that discovers the problem in October spends the whole season managing complaints about detention charges and missed cutoff fees. Learn more about FENGYE LOGISTICS. Learn more about Montreal warehousing by FENGYE Warehouse.

Originally published at https://www.fywarehouse.com/news/peak-season-warehouse-capacity-planning-the-dock-reality-9092cf85.