A replenishment job treated Easter Monday like any other Monday because its definition of a working day excluded only Saturday and Sunday. In Serguey Shinder’s account, that assumption collided with separate holiday rules in invoicing, payments, and the customer portal—and left people handling orders, missed collections, and customer apologies.
What went wrong on Easter Monday
Shinder reports that the replenishment job calculated stock, raised about 260 purchase orders, and booked carrier collections for Tuesday morning. The customer portal also offered delivery slots that included Easter Monday, even though staff would not be available to pick orders.
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According to his account, suppliers were closed, two carrier collections failed and were charged, and customer services apologized to 84 customers whose booked deliveries could not happen that day. These are figures reported by Shinder, not independently verified statistics; the account does not specify the incident year.
Why the systems disagreed about working days
The issue was not simply a scheduling glitch. Shinder says the definition of a working day existed in at least nine places, with different systems relying on different rules.
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- The replenishment job treated Saturday and Sunday as non-working days and every other day as working.
- Invoicing relied on a manually entered bank-holiday list in code dating from 2021 that ended in 2023.
- Payments used the bank’s calendar.
- The customer portal used its own table, maintained annually by a customer-services colleague.
Two Scottish depots also observed different bank holidays from the rest of the organization, but Shinder says only three of the nine locations knew about that distinction. Each system had effectively answered the question “When are we open?” on its own, without a shared source of truth.
How the organization responded
The organization built one business calendar covering public holidays by nation, site closures, and non-operating days for particular suppliers and carriers. Operations planning maintained it, and a single service made the calendar available to scheduled jobs and systems that offered dates.
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Before each bank holiday, the service generated a list of jobs expected to run or skip for someone in operations to review. Shinder says building the calendar took about a month. At the time of publication, seven of the nine locations had moved to it; migrations for the other two were planned for the following year. The account does not establish whether those migrations were later completed.
What to check in your own systems
The incident suggests a practical review: identify every place that decides whether a date is a working day, then check whether each one uses the same business rules.
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- ✓ PROTECT HOME & SAVE ENERGY: Activate automatic timer light switch's "Random" vacation mode to create the illusion of occupancy and deter potential intruders while you're away. Scheduled programming allows this wall timer switches to automatically turn lights on/off according to your schedule, perfect for managing porch lights, entryway lights, hallway lights, garage lights, patio lights, ceiling fans, and more while saving time, energy, and daily effort.
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- Holiday coverage: Confirm which nations’ public holidays are represented, including regional differences that matter to your sites.
- Local and partner closures: Check how site-specific closures and supplier or carrier non-operating days are recorded and kept current.
- Shared rules: Trace which scheduled jobs and customer-facing systems consult the same calendar, and look for independent code lists or manually maintained tables.
- Ownership: Make clear who maintains calendar entries and who checks that updates reach every system that depends on them.
- Pre-holiday review: Consider reviewing a list of jobs expected to run or skip before a holiday, as the organization in Shinder’s account did.
These checks follow from the failure modes and response he describes; they are not a tested product checklist. Shinder’s closing observation captures the underlying risk: “Automation takes a great deal of the business for granted. The days on which the business is open turned out to be one of the things it had been guessing.”
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