Every day, about 50 truckloads of merchandise turn up at Amazon’s warehouse in Staten Island, NY. One group of workers unloads the goods, and another group distributes them to work stations. There, a third group, stowers, transfers the items onto large shelving units that hold several dozen bins, and are attached to robots that move through the building. Stowers choose the bin where they want to place each item, trying to make the task as easy as possible for the worker, a picker, who will have to grab items out of the bin.
Picking inventory off shelves to fill customer orders is usually the most common job at an Amazon warehouse, and the company has worked for years to make its pickers more productive. At many warehouses, pickers walk miles each day in search of items, but algorithms provide them with the optimal route. In robotics fulfillment centers like the one on Staten Island, the pickers are stationary and the robots deliver items to them. (These warehouses account for more than 50% of its 175 centers).
The robots have raised the average picker’s productivity from 100 items per hour to 300 or 400 –and help explain why Amazon managed to ship more items than ever during last year’s holiday season with about 20% fewer seasonal workers. But robots have also made the job far more repetitive. Unlike pickers in manual warehouses, the pickers on Staten Island have almost no relief from plucking goods off shelves
Amazon plans to fully automate picking in the near future, reports The New York Times (July 7, 2019). It calculated that there was so much productivity to be gained from reducing the millions of miles its workers walk each year that it was better off finding robots well suited to moving goods all those miles, not worrying whether the system would later be compatible with robotic pickers.
Classroom discussion questions:
- Why would it be hard to replace the human pickers?
- Outline the process of merchandise flow in an Amazon warehouse that uses robots vs. one that does not.
