AMAZON SPECIAL Warehouse Smarts
Amazon’s new
warehouse near Manesar is buzzing with technology, ambition and efficient
humans
Humans follow processes, algorithms make decisions.
This is the logic underpinning an Amazon Fulfilment Centre, the hightech
warehouses that are primed to ship parcels with zero error and lightning speed,
to impatient customers all over the country. Amazon says it reaches all of the
20,500 pin codes in India.
The American retail giant now has 50 such warehouses
across India. It recently opened DEL 5, a facility near Manesar in Haryana, its
sixth such warehouse in the state. “These fulfilment centres help us serve
sellers on our platform as well as the buyers. When an FC opens in an area, a
lot of small businesses in that region get a big boost,” says Akhil Saxena, VP
for customer fulfilment at Amazon, during a recent tour of the facility.
DEL 5 sprawls across 300,000 sq ft, an area that can
fit 55 basketball courts. In the US, Amazon’s largest FC has a floor area of 1
million square feet. There is a lot of focus on safety. In the event of a fire
alarm, the entire facility is evacuated in 90 seconds.
This network of FCs is the infrastructure backbone of
any ecommerce operation. And Amazon, known for ruthless efficiency, elevates
warehousing into something of an art, with tech deployment every step of the
way.
The robotic warehouses whose footage recently went
viral on social media are not here yet, but all Amazon warehouses follow the
same processes and algorithmic logic as in Manesar. In the case of robotic
warehouses, instead of a human walking up to a shelf, the shelf comes to a
human.
Once an item enters the FC, its journey inside is
determined by the algorithm. Humans follow the instructions and perform a task
repeatedly, be it scanning, picking or packaging. Humans are also expected to
work with great efficiency. Every step and misstep is measured and evaluated.
No mirrors could be spotted in the building, including in the washrooms. A few
extra seconds spent adjusting your collar becomes wasted hours, at scale. That
is the kind of prioritisation that goes into shipping a parcel in two business
days.
Journey of an Item Inside an FC
Goods arrive
by trucks to a loading dock at a designated time. Merchants send packages with
barcodes generated using an Amazon dashboard. Each item has a unique ASIN
(Amazon Standard Identification Number). A receiving clerk at the FC scans the
barcode. Amazon also knows the dimensions of each item. An item that is
entering the Amazon system for the first time goes through a scan that
determines its dimensions. This is used to determine where the item will be
stored and also the size of the packaging it will eventually end up in.
Barcode Pairing
A principle at the heart of an
FC is the pairing of an item and its container, using barcodes. All items and
all containers, including carts used to move an item from one area to another,
have unique barcodes. When an item is moved from, say, a cart to a shelf, a
clerk scans the item and the shelf using a handheld device. This way, Amazon
knows where an item is, at all times.
Random Storing
There are broadly two strategies
in warehousing — category-based storing and random storing. In the former, all
shoes would be in one designated area, for instance. Amazon follows random
storage, which is more efficient. This means shoes are randomly spread all over
the shelves. So when an item is ordered, the probability of an item being close
to a picker is maximised, and time is thus saved. When a customer places an
order, the algorithm decides in an instant which picker is the closest to the
items in the order and sends the “pick”
instruction to that person.
Sorting and Packaging
Containers are diverted into two
kinds of packing bays — one for single-item orders and another for
multiple-item orders. The single-item bays are relatively uncomplicated.
Associates scan the barcode of the item and the system tells them which
packaging to pick. At the bay where containers with multiple orders arrive,
another level of sorting, also algorithmdriven, is involved. The algorithm
decides the picking in such a way that all the items ordered by, say, five
customers will arrive in four or five boxes. An associate then scans each item
and puts them in different slots and each slot then becomes a complete package
for one customer.
Sruthijith KK
ETM12AUG18
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