Thread by @jbryanporter

We toured an Amazon fulfillment center yesterday. It’s unbelievable.
 
Their inventory storage is counterintuitive. It’s organized randomness.
 
• Inventory is stored on moving shelves. Robots take shelves to the pick stations.
• Inventory is randomly placed on shelves, tracked by cameras.
• A SKU’s inventory is spread out across bins to always be close to a pick station.
• Shelves move over QR codes. Amazon always knows where everything is.
• Inventory counts are automated with cameras.
 
The computing that goes into the operation is incredible. Not sure it’d be possible without AWS.

The moving shelves take inventory to human pickers. Pickers remove the item in the order and place them in a bin.

Bin travel down miles of track to boxing stations.

Tracks either take the order to single unit boxing or multiple unit boxing.

Inventory is almost always moving.

Packaging for single unit orders is automated with custom boxes.

Items move down a track and have a custom box built around them as they keep moving. 🤯

I wasn’t allowed to video this machine so here’s a YouTube video. The machine is the CW 1000.

After items are boxed, they travel to loading stations.

Along the way boxes are weighed and given shipping labels. Boxes don’t stop moving, shipping labels are applied with air compressors to not damage boxes.

Based on the order’s destination, boxes are pushed down chutes to different loading stations.

We toured the BFI4 fulfillment center in Kent, Washington. They only store and fulfill items less than 25 lbs.

It’s a 850k sqft facility with 3 levels of storage and full air conditioned. It operates 24/7.

Amazon has different fulfillment centers for oversized items, refrigeration, returns processing and more.

It’s hard to overstate how big of an advantage logistics give Amazon over their competition.