Amazon Fulfilment Center

Amazon Fulfillment Center, San Bernardino, CA 

Just how do all those Amazon boxes get to your front door? We found out this January on a tour of the Amazon Fulfillment Center in San Bernardino, California.  This 1.2 million square foot facility is tucked into the warehouse district of San Bernardino, probably a city better known for agriculture and the world's first McDonald's restaurant. Built in 2012, the facility handles smaller products and Amazon Fresh groceries.  It also handles shipping of products by independent sellers, the "Fulfillment by Amazon" program.  A "seventh generation" facility, it still employs lots of human stockers, pickers and packers. When we visited, there were 2,500 employees working three shifts over an approximately 22.5 hour period (the center is closed for a short time each day for maintenance).  In November and December, the headcount swells to 6,000.

The place is noisy, filled with miles of conveyor belts going up to 25 mph.  That's why we were all given headphones and a little audio device as we headed out with our tour guide and two "tour ambassadors."  My perception was that the tour ambassadors were regular workers who had been given some time off to shepherd us through the facility.

At this point, you can read my description of the facility below or just watch a TV news segment about the whole facility right here: http://ktla.com/2016/05/09/how-amazon-fulfills-your-orders
I won't be offended if you watch the video and skip the text.  We weren't allowed to take pictures on the tour and my summary just isn't the same without them.

We started at vending machines that dispensed gloves, box cutters and other packing tools.  All are free to employees with a swipe of their access card.  Then we walked past rows of high demand products (think diapers and toilet paper), and on up to the regular warehouse. In slots rising up to the ceiling are stuffed a mixture of well, everything.  If it fits, in it goes.  I was surprised that similar items weren't grouped together.  But there is a reason for this madness. "Pickers" who pull items from these shelves, are less likely to pick out the wrong product if they are all different.  What if the DVD for the first Spiderman movie was next to the DVD for second Spiderman movie?  At the speed at which pickers go, a mistake could be made.  And one thing I've noticed about Amazon, is that they rarely make a delivery error.

A picker's most important weapon is the bar code scanner.  They scan both the shelf code and the item code, and place the item in a sturdy yellow bin. A picker is not focusing on one customer, just pulling from shelves for multiple orders in the most efficient manner.  Items in that bin are then resorted by customer, then sent off to the packer.

The packers stand at a packing station as yellow bins roll on past them.  Packers pack material in a dance of efficiency that is mesmerizing to watch.  They scan an item to be packed, and then watch their monitor to inform them which size box to put that object in.  Meanwhile, the right length of tape and packing bubble shoots out from machines next to them.  The packer puts it all together.  I don't know what the turnaround is in this packing job, as they don't release that information, but either you enter a Zen zone of rhythmic movements or you go a little crazy doing that. It must be a sight to see all those packers around Christmas time.  

Once it's packaged, your product runs through a 360 degree bar code scanner and is weighed.  If the weight is off, it's shuttled down to a human troubleshooter who figures out what the problem is.  This is how Amazon discovered that a DVD jacket contained no DVD.  Once scanned, a shipping label (the "manifest") gently floats down on each package as it passes the "SLAM" machine.  Why does it float onto the box?  So the package contents aren't damaged.  Unfortunately, the floating label often lands half off the box and half into the air.  Again, the human troubleshooter intercedes and all is remedied.  

Once the mailing label and weight are right on your box, it begins to pick up speed on the conveyor belt, hurtling around corners at up to 25 mph, where it is automatically pushed down a two or three-story chute to a waiting truck.  All carriers come to this facility, UPS, FedEx, USPS, and so on.  The computerized system knows right when to give a box a tap to send it to the right chute and the right truck.  It's a mechanical ballet. More humans pack the truck beds with boxes in the most efficient manner possible.  (As part of the tour, they give you a chance to pack empty boxes into a pallet.  We had to be quick and efficient and we were neither. It's not a job for the spatially challenged.)

One thing we did not see are the computer programmers and engineers that design this system.  In Amazon's newer 8th generation facilities, robots now handle some of the work, picking up items from storage shelves and bringing them to human sorters.  Eventually, more and more will be automated.  I assume the human trouble shooter will still have a place in this warehouse, and perhaps that will be the only human presence.

The tour is free and lasts about an hour, and you get to keep those snazzy Amazon headphones at the end.  You have to get tickets in advance, and the wait is about a year.  Yes, that's not a misprint.  It's that popular.  

Steven and Betsy at the end of the tour. Steven's parents also joined us for the tour.