Peak season in logistics: getting engineering cover lined up

It's the Monday after Black Friday. The sorter's running at full rate on nights. Every trailer slot is booked until Christmas Eve.

At 1am the induction on the main sorter trips. Your one shift fitter on nights is already on the dock, swapping a leveller hydraulic hose. Your controls engineer is on days, and asleep. The agency you rang last week says everyone decent went out in October.

You know this night. Most logistics sites have had a version of it.

Peak cover goes wrong because it gets booked late. The engineers are out there in September. By the third week of November they've gone to the sites that asked first.

Peak starts in October for us

Ops will tell you peak starts in mid-November. For the engineering team it starts now.

Volume goes up. Kit that runs two shifts runs three. The sorter, the shrink wrapper, the dock doors and the trucks all do more hours in six weeks than they did all summer. Small faults that ops lived with in August turn into stops. A worn belt or a drifting photo eye will hold out at half rate. At full rate, on nights, it won't.

Meanwhile your own team is thinner. Someone's got holiday they didn't take in the summer. Someone always gets the winter bug. And the people you've got are on more overtime than they'd pick.

So the question for October is simple. What will you be short of, on which shifts, and who fills it?

Work out the gap on paper

Get the peak rota out and lay it next to the volume plan. Then go shift by shift, not week by week.

For every shift in peak, ask:

• who's on, and what can they fix on their own
• which machines will be running hardest on that shift
• what happens if that person is on a breakdown and a second machine stops
• who can reach site inside an hour if it goes wrong

Be honest about skills. A strong mechanical fitter on nights is great for chain, bearings and rollers. If the sorter throws a drive fault or an I/O card drops out, they may be stuck. Our article on fitters, electricians and controls engineers goes into the mix in more detail.

Then put a number on the risk. You should know your cost per hour of downtime. In peak it's higher, because a stopped sorter means missed slots, late trailers and staff stood around on double time. Work it out properly once and you'll stop arguing about whether cover is worth paying for.

Book the cover before you need it

Here's our view. If peak is six weeks long, you book the extra engineer in October. Not the night the sorter stops.

There are two kinds of cover to line up, and most sites only do one.

The first is planned shift cover. An extra engineer on the nights you know will be hardest, usually the weekends after Black Friday and the run into Christmas. Book them by name if you can. Get them in for a shift or two before peak so they know the sorter and the panel layout. Our guide to inducting a contract engineer covers what to show them.

The second is breakdown cover. A number to ring at 2am when your own fitter is already flat out. Agree it now. Know the rates, know how long it takes them to get there, and know who on your side can say yes.

If peak cover runs long, watch the clock. Under the Agency Workers Regulations, an agency worker gets equal treatment on pay and conditions after 12 continuous calendar weeks* in the same role with the same hirer (regulation 7). An engineer who starts in early October and stays through to January will cross that line. Our post on the 12-week rule explains how the weeks are counted.

Overtime has a ceiling

The cheap answer is to ask your own team to do more. For a week, fine. For six weeks, it breaks people.

The limits are real. Workers can't work more than 48 hours a week* on average, normally averaged over 17 weeks*, unless they've opted out (GOV.UK). They have a right to 11 hours' rest* between working days, and to 24 hours* without any work each week (GOV.UK). An opt-out doesn't remove the safety risk.

HSE puts it simply. Long hours and badly designed shifts that leave no time to recover "can result in fatigue, accidents, injuries and ill health" (HSE, fatigue). A tired fitter on their sixth night shift is the one who skips the isolation to save five minutes. We've written more on fatigue and long shifts.

So use overtime for the gaps you didn't plan for. Don't build peak on it.

Get the kit ready too

Cover is half the job. The other half is giving them less to fix.

Before peak, walk the line with your team and pick the faults that will bite at full rate. Sorter belts and tilt trays. Photo eyes on the merges. Dock door and leveller hydraulics. Shrink wrapper film carriages. Batteries and chargers on the trucks.

Then sort your spares. For every machine that can stop the site, check the parts that fail most are on the shelf, not on order. Belts, sensors, a spare drive if you run a lot of the same one, contactors, fuses. A 2am breakdown with no part on the shelf turns a one-hour job into a lost night. If the sorter does go, our article on keeping the warehouse moving when a conveyor goes down is worth reading before it happens.

Freeze anything that isn't urgent. No software updates on the sorter PLC in week two of peak. No "while we're in there" jobs that turn a clean stop into a strip-down.

What to do on Monday

1. Lay the peak rota next to the volume plan. Mark every shift where one breakdown leaves no one to cover a second.
2. Book named cover engineers for the hardest nights, and get them in for a shift before peak starts.
3. Agree a breakdown callout number, the rates and who can approve it, and put it on the board in the engineers' office.
4. Walk the sorter, the docks and the wrapper with your team, and fix or stock for the five faults most likely to stop you.

* Agency qualifying period, working time limits, averaging period and rest periods correct as of 7 October 2026. Check the Agency Workers Regulations 2010, GOV.UK on working hours and GOV.UK on rest breaks for the latest.