Roses are red, chocolates get sold, and your ops team suddenly discovers what “peak season” really means.
If last Sunday’s Super Bowl taught us anything, it’s that some games get out of hand fast, and demand spikes can too. (Go Hawks!!) So instead of a fluffy list of “best practices,” here’s a readiness checklist you can implement immediately: the real bottlenecks that show up under pressure, plus the specific NetSuite actions and controls that keep things moving.
This is built for the day-of reality: less theory, more clicks. The goal is simple, get ahead of the exceptions that slow down order release, inventory commitment, picking, invoicing, and leadership visibility.
1) Orders piling up in approval or “stuck” statuses
When demand spikes hit, the first thing you’ll notice is the pileup: Sales Orders stacking in Pending Approval or Pending Fulfillment, payments captured but orders not moving, and internal teams pinging each other like it’s a group project with no owner. It’s not that anyone’s slacking, it’s that the system has no single “here’s what’s blocked and why” lane.
Do this now: build a single “Orders Stuck” queue and push it to the right people
Create a Saved Search: “Demand Spike, Orders Stuck”
- Go to Reports > Saved Searches > All Saved Searches > New, choose Sales Order
- Criteria to start with (keep it tight):
Main Line = true
Status is Pending Approval OR Pending Fulfillment (add more later, but start here)
Ship Date is today through next 2 days
Optional if you have them: Payment Hold, Fraud Hold, Credit Hold flags
Results columns that matter day-of
- Sales Order Number
- Customer
- Status
- Ship Date
- Location
- Amount
- Approval Status
- Next Approver (if available in your account)
- Any hold reason fields you use
Put it where it’ll actually get worked
- Add the search as a Saved Search portlet on the dashboards of:
> whoever approves
> whoever releases to the warehouse
> whoever handles payment or credit holdsTurn on alerts, but only for the exceptions
- On the saved search, use the Email tab:
enable alerts for create and update
use “send on update” style behavior if you need to catch
late edits
if your account supports it, set Updated Fields so you’re
alerted only when critical fields change (ship date,
location, shipping method, totals, holds)Operating rule: if it’s not in the queue, it doesn’t exist. If it’s in the queue, someone owns it.
2) Inventory getting weird, oversells, backorders, misallocations
This is the part where confidence dies. Someone swears the item is available, but the picker can’t find it. Orders are “committed” in ways that don’t match reality, a hot SKU gets allocated to the wrong channel, and customer service starts doing manual inventory checks like it’s 2007. Demand spikes don’t create inventory problems, they expose the ones you’ve been surviving.
Do this now: confirm commitment behavior, then give yourself a reallocation lever
Check your commitment preferences
- Go to Setup > Accounting > Preferences > Accounting Preferences
- Look for your Order Management section and confirm how commitment is handled in your environment.
The goal during a spike is consistency. Either you commit reliably, or you commit intentionally and manually, but you don’t want half-commit chaos.
Confirm your ordering logic for item commitment
- In the same area, confirm the setting that controls what NetSuite prioritizes when it allocates inventory.
- During demand spikes, most teams want a clear rule like ship date priority, order priority, or customer tier priority.
Create Saved Search: “Uncommitted Lines Due to Ship”
- Saved Search type can be Sales Orders, line level if needed
Criteria ideas:
Ship Date within next 48 hours
Quantity Committed is 0, or committed less than ordered
Status not closed, not cancelledThis becomes your “inventory risk list” for the day.
Use Reallocate Items to fix the mess fast
- Go to Transactions > Order Management > Reallocate Items
- Pick the item and location, then reassign allocation to the orders that matter most (today’s ship dates, key accounts, highest margin, whatever your rule is)
If you need to force commitment on a cadence
- If your setup supports it, use Schedule Commit Orders
- The day-of play is to run it at set intervals so the system isn’t committing once in the morning and drifting all day.
Pro move: make a “Hot SKUs” list.
- Create an Item saved search for your fast movers: ( low available / high open demand / high backorder exposure )
- Pin it to ops. This is what prevents the “we ran out at 2 PM and nobody noticed” situation.
3) Warehouse throughput gets crushed
What it looks like: pick and pack queues balloon, the floor can’t keep up, kitting slows everything down, orders don’t reach “shipped” fast enough.
Here’s where it gets physical. Pick and pack queues balloon, the floor can’t keep up, kitting slows everything down, and orders don’t reach “shipped” fast enough to hit carrier cutoffs. When demand spikes, the warehouse doesn’t need more reports, it needs a clean release strategy and a way to see what’s stuck before it becomes a pile of angry tickets.
Do this now: stop one-order chaos, release work in waves, track completion
Adopt “Wave Logic” for the spike
Even if you do not wave pick year-round, spikes are when it pays off. Your goal is to batch work in a way that reduces travel and context switching.
- Group by ship date windows, zone, carrier cutoff times, or item similarity.
- Release a wave, finish it, then release another.
If you use NetSuite WMS, firm-commit wave quantities
- Go to your WMS and order management preferences and enable the setting that automatically firm commits quantities in a wave if available in your account.
- This prevents inventory from getting reallocated mid-pick, which is a silent killer during spikes.
Create Saved Search: “Released Waves Not Completed”
- Track wave status, released, in progress, stuck.
- Put this on the warehouse lead dashboard.
- The best warehouse question on spike days is not “how many orders do we have,” it’s “what’s stuck.”
Optional if you have kitting: build a “Kits Blocking Shipment” queue.
- If kits or assemblies are the bottleneck, your day-of success depends on seeing exactly which orders are blocked by missing components.
4) Shipped but not invoiced, payments not applied, finance plays cleanup crew
This is the aftershock that hits finance while ops is still celebrating “we survived.” Orders ship, but invoicing lags. Cash comes in, but it’s unapplied or partially applied. Leadership asks for today’s numbers, and the answers start sounding like guesses because the truth is scattered across partial shipments, partial invoices, and manual workarounds.
Do this now: create two finance queues and clear them daily
Saved Search: “Shipped, Not Invoiced”
- Find orders or fulfillments that have shipped but are not billed.
- Put it on the controller dashboard.
- During a spike, finance needs a list, not a scavenger hunt.
Saved Search: “Payments Unapplied or Partially Applied”
- Identify customer payments with remaining amounts, or invoices with balances that should have been closed.
- Demand spikes create partials everywhere, partial shipments, partial invoices, partial payments, and those partials are what explode month-end close.
Run invoicing in a batch
- Use your account’s invoicing workflow, often something like Transactions > Sales > Bill Sales Orders or Invoice Sales Orders, depending on configuration.
- The day-of move is to process in scheduled blocks, not randomly between fires.
5) Leadership has questions,
When execs start asking “what’s backordered,” “how much did we sell today,” and “are we profitable on this promo,” the real bottleneck becomes visibility. If every answer requires an export, and every export tells a slightly different story, you don’t have a data problem, you have a decision latency problem. Demand spikes make that painfully obvious.
Do this now: build a Demand Spike Command Center dashboard
Create one dashboard that answers the five questions that matter during a spike. Add these as portlets, all saved searches you already created above.
- Orders Stuck in Queue
- Uncommitted Lines Due to Ship
- Hot SKUs at Risk
- Released Waves Not Completed
- Shipped Not Invoiced
- Payments Unapplied or Partially Applied
Operating rule: meetings start with the dashboard, not with someone’s spreadsheet. If it’s not visible, visibility is the first fix.
Whether your weekend playlist is Bad Bunny, Kid Rock, or something you’d never admit to in the office, the point is this: you should be able to relax knowing you did what you needed to do to clear the bottlenecks before they snowballed.
If you’re running into a demand spike problem we didn’t cover, tell us. We’ve probably seen it, fixed it, and kept the receipts.
Reach out anytime at [email protected], call +1 (720) 254-1320, or visit saloraerp.com. We’re always here to help.
