 Random stowMarch 20, 2018 |
Chaos theory
Amazon promises unlimited two-day shipping on everything from toothbrushes to dressers for the tens of millions of people who have signed up for its Prime service. That's a lot of packages—about 5 billion last year alone. Given that volume, "every opportunity to improve a process by a second is relevant," a regional warehouse manager told Quartz.
To achieve one of the most efficient e-commerce operations on planet Earth, Amazon has set up warehouses that look like a live-action game of Chutes and Ladders—whizzing with a meticulously coordinated system of conveyor belts, slides, and machines that do various tasks, like attaching labels to boxes and checking weight for quality control.
The one thing it hasn't organized at all? Inventory. Items aren't arranged by size, shipment date, or any other system. They're shelved 100% randomly, wherever workers can find a place to stash them.
In other words, one of the most efficient tech companies in the world embraces the organizational tactics of a teenager's bedroom. How could this possibly work? (Spoiler: It does.)
149: Number of Amazon warehouses worldwide
25: Number of Amazon warehouses that use shelf-moving robots
$775 million: Amount that Amazon paid to acquire warehouse-robot company Kiva in 2014
100,000: Number of Kiva robots deployed in Amazon warehouses
60 to 75 minutes: Estimated time from when an order is placed until Amazon ships it
15 minutes: Amount of time the same job takes with the aid of robots
20 mph: Speed of items moving on conveyer belts
"One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star."
— Frederich Nietzsche
How does it work?
The reason it makes sense to group these random products together has everything to do with technology: the speed and frequency with which customers order online, and the tools that Amazon has developed to keep track of every item in its vast warehouses.
At a traditionally organized warehouse, when a shipment of, say, toothpaste arrives, an employee looks up the toothpaste shelf, and then moves the box to that shelf. At an Amazon warehouse, if a box containing 50 tubes of toothpaste has just arrived, a worker will open the box, remove each tube, and store each one individually wherever there's space—most likely at many different locations in the warehouse.
There are a few general rules about how items are stored—larger books (but no knives!) go on top shelves, heavier items on the bottom, and similar items aren't stored in close proximity. "The system knows not to assign Harry Potter Book #1 in the slot next to Harry Potter Book #2; when an employee dashes into the "Stow" area to begin the "Pick" stage, the chances of grabbing the wrong book are a lot higher when they're right next to each other," according to Mary-Patton S. Davis.
The era of index
Here's the crucial thing to understand: Just because storage is random doesn't mean nobody's keeping track. Before a worker places something on a shelf, she uses a handheld computer to scan a barcode on both the product and the shelf. This allows the computer to keep track of where every item is located.
Instead of sorting and filing, in other words, products are basically indexed. In the same way that Google's search prowess made stashing old emails away in carefully foldered archives a thing of the past, Amazon's indexing system takes the sorting out of physical space. Anything can be retrieved at any time, because the algorithm knows how to find it.
"Amazon realized that in some senses computers are messier than we usually allow the physical world to be: You can just put data anywhere in a computer; you access it by knowing where it is rather than by putting it all in order in prearranged boxes. It applied the same principle to its warehouses, and it worked."
Why random works better for e-commerce
- Randomness reduces travel time. If there were a dedicated "toothpaste shelf," a "picker"—how Amazon refers to employees who gather items—would need to travel there, whether he were 10 feet or 100 yards away from that location. But if the warehouse stores toothpaste in 50 different locations, there's a much better chance that there's a tube close by.
- Most items are shipped one by one. Amazon and other e-commerce companies sell directly to customers (as opposed to wholesaling to retailers). That means they'll ship a single tube of toothpaste to a customer, not a box of 50 tubes—so there's no reason to keep all 50 tubes together in the warehouse.
- Randomness saves space. Amazon warehouses carry a huge variety of items that can be ordered at any moment, but they do not carry a huge number of each item. "They may only have one box of Cheerios," says Tom Galluzzo, the founder of Iam Robotics, which makes warehouse robots. "If you were to have a space for every product, you would need a gigantic warehouse." Reserving empty space on the "toothpaste shelf" while waiting for the next shipment of toothpaste would mean its warehouses would need to be even bigger: It's more efficient to use any free shelf space available.
How do warehouse robots work?
Perhaps you're imagining the Terminator packing your orders: It's not like that. Amazon's warehouse robots are small, box-like machines that pick up shelves and move them along a grid. Amazon warehouses with robots (still a minority) use the same random stow strategy as non-robotized warehouses, with the exception that robots bring shelves to the workers instead of the workers bringing items to the shelves.
Pop quiz Which of the following investments in delivery has Amazon not made? |
This is how Amazon puts labels on your packages.
Amazon's next challenge
As warehouse operations become more and more automated, e-commerce companies like Amazon will save money on human labor (cue discussion of robots and automation and jobs 😱) that they can spend on delivery. Figuring out how to make this "last mile" between the warehouse and your doorstep as cheap, efficient, and on-demand as possible is a problem that the company has already spent a lot of money exploring.
Quartz's new project How It Got There demystifies how the world's most important companies make their products and get them into your hands. Read the series here.
Poll Will you be adopting random stow at home? |
In last week's poll about El Paquete, 66% of you said you've only been to Cuba in your dreams, but 7 (7, not 7%) of you said "I'm reading this on El Paquete right now!" We have no way of knowing whether that's true, but we'll take your word for it!
Today's email was written by Sarah Kessler, edited by Jessanne Collins, and produced by Luiz Romero.
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