Amazon is the world’s largest online marketplace that processes more than 4 million orders daily. The total number of sellers in this giant marketplace exceeds 3 million and the number of products placed in its catalog is nearly 350 million. This amount of work is not easy to handle, so Amazon employs 4 times more than another global giant – Google, while most of the 270.000 employees work in warehouses. Amazon has its own secrets due to which the number of delivery errors can be minimized.
Amazon’s benefits
- Strict control at every stage
The main secret of the clear and well-coordinated work of Amazon warehouse services is the most complex computer control system that plans every step of employees in the company’s huge warehouses. The computer calculates the schedule of people’s work down to seconds, leaving no chance to waste time aimlessly. Those who do not complete the task within the time limit set by the machine may be fired.
Commodity items are not sorted by the department but are added to vacant cells as they arrive. Books and clothes, smartphones, and hammers can coexist on the same shelf. It is impossible for a person to understand this logic, and this is not required. The warehouse management system is based on barcodes. Incoming goods are assigned a code of a certain cell. As soon as the buyer has placed an order, the address appears on the scanner screen of the employee located next to the storage location (the number of the row and shelf). The only thing left for a person to do is to go to the shelf, re-verify the barcode in order to exclude an error, and transfer the goods to the order assembly.
Strict restrictions are in place to prevent theft. Employees leave all personal belongings in a locker before work and change into overalls without pockets. The security service monitors the movement of the warehouse during the day and all workers are screened after the shift. It is clear that the efficiency of the online retailer is really amazing due to the exclusion of the human factor. For example, a logistics center in Kentucky processes about 400 orders per second and a delivery truck departs every 2 minutes.
- The sophisticated goods movement system
The goods go a long way from the moment of receipt at the warehouse to delivery to the buyer. It starts with the distribution of supplies to warehouses. The items received at the warehouse are unpacked; each unit is marked with a barcode and put into baskets. Then, the goods in the baskets are delivered along the conveyor to different sites, where they are distributed into free cells and the addresses are fixed by scanning the barcodes of the goods and cells. So the electronic system understands where this or that object lies. A person will not understand this apparent chaos, since there is no usual sorting by type of product in Amazon warehouses. Employees do not even know what is located on the shelf, as they are guided by the addresses of the cells. The designations of the section, row, and cell number are encrypted in the alphanumeric code.
When an order is placed on the site, the system instantly finds the goods in the warehouse closest to the buyer and sends a signal to the employee who is closest to the storage location at that moment. Goods are moved to the place of assembly of orders on the conveyor. Here, employees arrange them on multi-tiered shelves with wheels. One section of such a shelf is one order. Shelves are taken to the place of packing orders, where things from one section are put into branded boxes. The appropriate size of the box is determined by the computer, which also sends a command to issue packing tape and airbags to protect fragile items in case of need. It takes about 30 seconds to assemble the order, so people have no time to rest.
Once packaged, finished orders are transported on a conveyor belt to the postmarking area and then await loading on the lower floor of the warehouse. From here, orders are shipped worldwide using Amazon’s own transport, as well as postal, courier, and logistics services.Perhaps robots will find goods in the warehouse themselves in the near future, deliver them to conveyors, and pack them. Who knows, maybe drones and unmanned vehicles will replace truck drivers but now it’s possible to get desired items via Amazon freight forwarder. It’s about the ARDI Express Company that is responsible for quick and safe freight conveyance from China to Amazon. The organization has lots of warehouses in different Chinese provinces so all the steps are well-thought-out. Get acquainted with the company’s cooperation conditions and you can be sure that the organization will become a reliable intermediary for a successful business.