Which of your peak-season fixes actually pay?
Five peak-season risks with the mitigations priced at what they really cost. The two you would fight hardest for both lose money, and the whole net-positive set of decisions on the page is worth $11,000.
Operations Intermediate Risk Register Pro engine
After you install, this is the model to open.
What Could Go Wrong at Peak?
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
This one runs on a Pro engine, and every free install includes five full-quality runs on your own numbers, shared across all five Pro engines rather than five for each. After that, Pro is $199/year.
The answer
- Exposure on the register
- $246,000 expected cost of the five risks, unmitigated
- The two everybody wants
- -$15,000 net: stock second buy -$4K, warehouse standby -$11K
- The quiet good buys
- +$11,000 early pickers +$6K, returns desk +$3K, second carrier +$2K
- Buy only what pays
- $52,000 spent on the three net-positive mitigations
Five things that go wrong at peak, priced. Total expected exposure comes back at $246,000 and the mitigations would take it to $103,000, which reads like an easy yes until you look at what they cost. The net value column disagrees with almost everything the room would have decided. The second buy on the best-selling line is the biggest exposure at $81,000, costs $40,000, and clears minus $4,000.
The warehouse standby is second on exposure at $54,000, costs $55,000, and clears minus $11,000. Those are the two everybody argues for. Meanwhile recruiting the pickers early costs $18,000 and clears $6,000, the extra returns staff cost $9,000 and clear $3,000, and the second carrier costs $25,000 and clears $2,000. The whole net-positive set of decisions on this page is worth $11,000 and none of it is exciting.
Two things are worth taking seriously before you act on that. The first is that the warehouse outage is a 6% chance of a $900,000 event, and the net value column prices it as an average across many peaks while you only get one peak a year. A mitigation that loses $11,000 in expectation and removes a $900,000 weekend is exactly the kind of insurance a single-season business should probably buy, and the register can tell you the price of that decision but not whether to take it.
The second is what the band column does here. Nothing on this sheet is banded High, including the largest exposure and including the $900,000 outage, because the band scores impact relative to the largest impact on the register, and the $900,000 pushes every other line down into the low relative bands. One outlier in the impact column flattens the banding for everything else, so read the exposure and the net value and treat the band as a rough sort rather than a verdict.
Second run: delete the outage line entirely and rerun. Total exposure falls by $54,000 to $192,000 and every remaining band moves up, three of the four to High, which proves the point in one click. To adapt it, put your own five peak risks in, price each mitigation at what your finance team would actually approve, and set the impacts from lost margin rather than from lost revenue.
The model
It arrives on a tab called Template: What Could Go Wrong at Peak, carrying these columns:
- Risk
- Probability
- Impact ($)
- Mitigated prob
- Mitigated impact ($)
- Mitigation cost
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Tool up or keep paying the supplier?Make It or Buy It?
- Is the round your driver does now the shortest?Which Order of Stops Makes the Shortest Delivery Round?
- How much does it cost to pull the event now?What If It Has to Be Cancelled?
- Will the new store pay for its fit-out?Is the New Store Worth Opening?
- How many stores does your pilot really need?How Big Does the Pilot Have to Be?
- Should you drop the slow line?Should We Drop This Line?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Schedule risk analysis.