Inside Amazon's Largest Warehouse

[Music] as the world's largest online retailer it's no surprise that amazon has a gigantic warehouse it spans 2.3 million square feet across four floors and the center includes a highly automated warehouse space for comparison the empire state building in new york city is 2.7 million square feet located in phoenix arizona this warehouse handles the bulkier items that won't fit in a regular tote it opened in 2011 and has over a thousand employees who work 24 7 to ship various items including furniture hockey sticks lawn mowers and everything you can find on the seemingly endless amazon website with thousands of orders rolling in every hour amazon has no other option but to equip their warehouses with highly efficient people and the very best in tech to aid them in the process today we take a look inside amazon's largest warehouse welcome back to our channel before we begin make sure you hit the subscribe button and ring the bell so you never miss a video from us the amazon warehouse or fulfillment center as it's called in company jargon is a uniquely 21st century creation in the anchor of their physical operations you can go on the app or the website and buy things with a single click and it all comes down to how efficiently the people and the robots in this space function in order to get you your new iphone or garden hose or board game the building which is about the size of 36 football fields has employees using technology to find the items required to determine which size of box to use for packaging and where to ship it amazon likes to keep its working process a secret from the public giving you almost the illusion of magic when your box ships the same day you ordered it but make no mistake the work that goes into delivering that product is long and intricate its fulfillment machine is finely tuned not just to serve amazon itself but anyone else who wants to sell their products on the site that's right more than two million third-party vendors also use this space amazon keeps its brand front and center in these listings but these sellers are still crucial to the company's future they now supply about 40 of the items sold on amazon annually and last year third parties sold more than a billion items worth tens of billions of dollars so the world's largest online retailer not only lets other sellers list their items on its website but lets them outsource shipping as well the warehouse contains two fulfillment operations working as mirror images of each other this helps the center scale up or down depending on the volume of orders the central mezzanine provides panoramic views of both sides of the warehouse and an impossible to trace web of conveyor belts and rollers move around items and yellow bins from one point to another filled with goods destined for either the warehouse shelves or for customers the inventory here is made up of merchandise small enough to be stored on shelves about the size of those at a typical library which is exactly what this space is called each shelf is divided into cubbies and each cubby has a barcode and an alphanumeric id interestingly these barcodes don't signify anything about the type of product in the cubby everything is just stored wherever it fits and identical copies are stowed in spots throughout the warehouse sounds random and inconvenient we get it after all when you're in a supermarket you find all the toothpastes in one aisle and there isn't a random cake mix thrown in there you need order in a warehouse especially one of this size while it may appear chaotic it's far from it you've probably heard the rumor that amazon warehouse workers on average walk 12 miles a day within the warehouse to fetch and drop things around well that's no longer true because identical products can be found all over the warehouse a worker has to travel less to find the product you ordered randomness also helps with managing the wide range of items amazon offers because it helps save space if you kept a dedicated section for toothpastes in the warehouse and it wasn't being used because you haven't received a shipment yet that usable space is just lying empty it's more efficient to use any free space available but then how do they keep track even if the product is a bit of a walk away these warehouses are patrolled by robots that can pick up entire shelves and bring them to the worker working at a fixed station all right let's go through this step by step let's say you place an order for a fog free shower mirror from the store shavewell shavewell ships its mirrors to amazon where they are stored in various locations around the warehouse trucks will arrive with boxes of goods that the workers open scanned and put into yellow bins the conveyors route the bins to different parts of the warehouse where other workers will unload them scan them again and then scan the cubby in which they're storing the mirror this way the computer knows where to find the shave well mirror or anything else the customers asked for it's also worth mentioning that amazon charges third-party sellers for shelf space down to one-tenth of an inch and they also take a cut out of the order's ship but in exchange they also offer marketing and distribution services so you can focus on your business so it's a fair deal but back to your order for the mirror your order is funneled from amazon's website to the warehouse to a handheld scanner carried by all the workers in the library the scanners direct the workers to the nearest cubby where the ordered item is stored this item is then picked scanned and placed into a yellow bin which is also scanned it travels on a conveyor system to one of many pre-packaging stations where workers sort items into small slots on shelves with wheels those shelves are then rolled into packing stations where another worker packages the orders into cardboard boxes the size of the cardboard box that has to be used for the item is also determined by a computer once packed the boxes all head down to another belt to get labeled for the mailing address sealed and stamped they're now ready to head down to the final shoots before being loaded onto trucks for delivery in a way the amazon fulfillment center is like a giant robot amazon is looking into incorporating more robots into its warehouses in 2012 they acquired the company that makes the robots called kiba systems for 775 million dollars since then it has deployed over 100 000 machines across 25 warehouses worldwide kiva's robots have taken amazon's random organization strategy and made it even faster the click-to-ship cycle which is the time it takes to pick a product from the stacks pack it and ship it was around to 75 minutes when workers handled the process manually but with the help of robots the same job is done in 15 minutes warehouses equipped with kiva robots can also load 50 percent more inventory than those without them still human hands and brains are still the best tools for most jobs in the center currently amazon has maximum advantage over its major retail rivals none of which were founded as tech companies first at the same time no other tech rival and yes were including the likes of apple and microsoft can come close to amazon's physical logistical advantage in retail unlike software fulfillment centers aren't built overnight this practice likely took years of work and trial and error and competitors like alibaba have little chance of entering the u.s market when they couldn't even hope to replicate amazon's insane infrastructure for now that superiority means amazon is defining the 21st century consumer experience sellers will always flock to amazon to distribute their goods and the speed and convenience of amazon will have buyers coming back for more amazon's warehouses are designed to be wish fulfillment machines equipped to feed their consumers once with speed and precision at a scale that still hasn't found its limit we keep asking for things and amazon magically makes it all happen as amazon continues to expand its capacity the physical reach it can offer its sellers extends even more the same way cloud services have become the foundation for businesses going online amazon's fulfillment centers act as the networked hubs of the consumer economy which frees up businesses to focus on manufacturing rather than distributing whether you want to learn from the retail giant or apply its logistics system to your own business there are plenty of lessons to learn from their process amazon has raised the standards for management and how workers pick pack and ship products it has even invited other businesses like shavewell an amazon seller success story to piggyback on its proven methods and grow their businesses as well so what do you think let us know in the comments below if you enjoyed the video make sure you hit the like button and check out the simply tech channel for more videos all about tech thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Simply Tech

Views: 152,727

Keywords: amazon, amazon warehouse, amazon largest warehouse, amazon campus, aws backup, audible amazon prime, amazon cloudwatch amazon web, warehouse, jeff bezos, fulfillment center, fulfillment house, amazon fulfilment, amazon delivery technology, amazon technology, amazon prime, shipping, fast shipping, how amazon works, how amazon delivers, inside amazon, ai, robots, amazon robots, amazon ai, smart warehouse, warehouse jobs, new ceo amazon, ceo amazon, andy jassy, simply tech

Id: _AthU0fgtCQ

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021