Invisible System

“Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History.” So reads a sign above the entrance to Amazon’s newest UK “fulfilment centre” (or warehouse) in Hemel Hempstead.

Inside lies more than 40,000 sq m of shelving, packing lines and millions of products. One area where larger products are stored is known as “pallet land” and adjacent, at another end of the space sits “the tower”, where several floors of shelving are stacked on top of each other. Pickers constantly, and more or less silently, walk up and down the tower’s lengthy aisles, pushing carts into which they deposit items purchased by someone, somewhere online. Founded at the dawn of the web in 1994, Amazon is now reportedly worth $247bn (£157bn). But the company is not, in fact, hugely profitable. What keeps Amazon afloat? As for any business with tight margins, efficiency is key

A recent New York Times investigation revealed that the corporate culture inside Amazon is highly driven by data: personal performance, for example, is continually checked with a software system called the Anytime Feedback Tool that allows employees to share praise or criticism about their colleagues.

At the company’s warehouses, the workers are also guided and monitored by software, but in a much more direct way. When you order an item online, the Amazon system quickly works out where the item sits in its inventory, and dispatches a human picker to go fetch it. “It’s not about learning where things are, in your head, or having to memorise,” explains general manager Henry Low. “We make the task as simple as possible.”

One of the first things that strikes you about the Amazon fulfilment centres is that the products aren’t organised logically – or at least in the kind of fashion that a human would use. For instance, products on shelves are not organised by category. Instead, they are placed on shelves as if by random. An HDMI cable lies near to five copies of some Harry Potter sheet music. A brand of baby’s bottle is across the aisle from a drain water diverter. But there is method to this apparent madness. “Imagine picking one model of HDMI cable from a shelf of hundreds of them,” says Low. The pickers are not meant to have to think too long about what they’re retrieving – the whole process is designed to be as streamlined as humanly possible.

Haozhou Zeng

picker scans it with a handheld device to ensure that the correct object has been taken. And every item’s progress throughout the warehouse is constantly monitored thanks to a series of points at which it is scanned again – for example at the moment of being labelled with the customer’s name and address. “We are able to track where the item is at any one time at the fulfilment centre,” says Low, who is both confident and clearly proud of the attention to detail.

Even so, the human element is arguably the weak link in the efficiency chain, and new computer-based systems that promise to automate Amazon’s operations even further might one day take over the ferrying of products themselves. Kiva Systems is a little-known Amazon subsidiary which develops hi-tech warehouse robotics. Instead of human pickers going to and from shelves in a large space, the shelves themselves are mobile and travel on wheels to stationary pickers who simply lift off the required item. Dutifully, the robot shelves then return to their place.

From BBC FUTURE

SCI-Arc Spring 2020

Serious Objects