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Inside Newegg's East Coast Distribution Center
MrSeb writes "Did you know that Newegg is the second largest e-tailer in the U.S., after Amazon? Perhaps building your own computer isn't dead yet! Matthew Murray was recently invited to take a tour of the Newegg east coast distribution center and see what goes on behind the scenes. 'The 350,000-square-foot Edison warehouse not only houses some 15,000 SKUs of products, it also ships as many as 15,000 packages a day ... All of the different products the company carries are sorted both by category and how easy they are to move: Obviously, HDTVs are more cumbersome and difficult to remove safely than processors. Some mobile equipment, such as laptops, netbooks, and tablets, are stored in a special “high-value” area behind a chain-link fence that’s been erected within the warehouse itself.'"
Yep, if you visit a Fry's electronics, the RAM, processors and other high value per volumetric cm objects are kept in a literal wrought iron cage behind the counters. I worked at a CompUSA back in high school; the Palm Pilots and Handspring Visors, laptops and whatnot were kept in a separate room. You had to walk through the cash office (already a locked door), inside the cash office was a second locked door that took you to the electronics lockup room, which contained a fenced off set of 5-10 shelves with laptops and palm pilots, etc. I only saw the inside of that room once in the 18 months I worked there. I think the Fry's cage used to hold SD and CF cards as well, back when an 8GB card fetched more than $15.
moox. for a new generation.
That didn't matter at Computer City or CompUSA. A buddy of mine worked at both of those (by virtue of one absorbing the other) and when both stores were closed he was kept on to help close them. One store apparently never had its camera system installed, and they found that out when they took down those fisheye covers in the ceiling to find them devoid of cameras but chock full of empty merchandise packaging, mostly memory and hard disk drive packaging. Literally a couple-hundred-thousand dollars worth of missing merchandise. Based on where the storage for these products was, it looks like employees were opening packages, stuffing the products into their clothes, and then tossing the packaging up above the drop ceiling that was about 7' up, so the packaging went out of sight to anyone coming in to inspect the room. The other store was equally bad, as apparently warehouse staffers who were paid to bring secured merchandise out to customers were bringing more than one of an item out at a time, loading one in the customer's car, then loading the other into their own. This was finally caught on to by a CUSTOMER who saw a worker load a TV into his own car, and asked the store manager about it. Jailtime was the sentence in the latter, but no one was caught in the former.
The only way, in my opinion, to keep this crap from happening is to find a way to only let real managers (ie, not people promoted to manager so that they can be paid a crap salaried wage while working too many hours) have access to the secured merchandise, and to tie their salaries to the sales and inventory results of the secured merchandise. If the store's inventory gets too out-of-whack, the managers get penalized. Technically they could let non-managers in to these spaces, but if their salaries are based on such numbers they'd be much less inclined to let anyone whose salary isn't based on those numbers in to the area.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I've often wondered with McMaster's warehouses (what are now called fulfillment centers) are like. My office is a couple of states away from their NYC center and I routinely get next-day delivery if I order by 7pm the night before, without any rush charges. Back in the day when I lived in LA, I would often get same day delivery if I ordered in the morning, and that includes going through the university delivery service. Again, no rush charges, just astonishingly fast service. That, and in the 15-or-so years that I've been ordering from them, they've made a mistake only once, packing qty 2 instead of qty 1 of an item, over hundreds of orders.
Ya know, I hate to say this, but at least they were only stealing from the stores. i used to work in a little shop down the street from a Best buy and we were always swamped taking care of the PCs Worst buy "fixed". it was bad enough when we would get floppies put in upside down, hard drives literally beat into the cage because some clueless GS worker didn't know how to release the latch, but i don't know how many time i had to tell folks the reason their PC was slow, or their new graphics card was running like shit was because somebody at Worst Buy palmed it and gave them some shit out of the back if they didn't just rip it straight from the hinges like they'd do with RAM. That was how I met my last GF, I had to tell her the reason her PC was slow after she took it in to get cleaned was because while her PC was supposed to have 1Gb of RAM someone had helped themselves and left her a 256Mb stick in its place.
The bitch is the guy running that BB had to know something was hinky just from all the complaints he got from folks that would call them right from my counter but he made it clear that unless they had some before and after pics or some other proof he didn't give a crap what they or even the label on the side of the PC said, it wasn't his problem. Frankly I really wasn't surprised when they ended up moving to a new location because 'business was down' in that area. No shit, ripping off your customers can have that effect or so I hear.
as for TFA Newegg, Tiger, and Amazon are my three favorite places to shop anymore, never have a bit of hassle, never have a problem. Every time i've tried dealing with local shops I've found piss poor selection, clueless help, and insane prices. With Newegg you can tell pretty easily if something is junky just by the amount of negatives, just look at the rating on some of the Seagate drives for an example. Personally i'd rather shop there than deal with retail hassles, thanks Newegg!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It sounds like it would be fairly trivial to get someone inside to take a look, tunnel under the building and up through the floor...
Someone's been watching too much TV. Digging a tunnel is *hard work*. It takes months to do it with expensive machinery, or years to do it by hand, and it leaves obvious evidence while you're doing it (large piles of dirt). So you'll spend more resources than you'll gain, and you'll get caught doing so.
The exception would be if there's already some kind of tunnel under the secure area. There was one documented case I recall where a bank vault had been built right over a sewer tunnel, or something like that. But most of the time, they don't build buildings over tunnels or pipes -- not because of security, but because it makes engineering the foundation supports harder.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
IMHO, such businesses ought to have their secured merchandise in a "locked" room (easily circumvented) with a security camera that looks like it was accidentally broken/disabled (e.g. insecurely mounted so it's pointing in the wrong direction). Send new employees back there alone regularly, after hours even.
Next, review video footage from the four hidden cameras and closely check stock over the weekend. Honest employees will never know, and dishonest employees will get weeded out before their first paycheck.
I worked at a grocery store too, way back in the day. If you wanted some Entenmann's cookies or donuts or similar you just needed to walk over to the displays, some fat fingered customer had already ripped open a package or two to snag one. Plenty of ripped open items throughout the store. Of course, if seen eating from an already opened item, you could be termed anyway, but I had no problem doing it as the item would be thrown out at that point, just preserve the box so the store got credit. I did not consider eating soon to be trash theft.
When there are billions of dollars at stake, hard work and cheap labor are easy. For a few hundred thousand or a couple million dollars of traceable merchandise, no, it is not worth digging such a tunnel.
The grocery store I worked in (20+ years ago) had a sort of "thieves code" instilled by some of the managers, they would openly abuse the breakage bin in-front of the employees, and when a new employee would finally do it in-front of them they were "in the club." Abusing the breakage bin typically consisted of ripping a bag of cookies or similar, taking a few, and sending the rest back to the vendor for credit. After induction to the club, the manager would explain which products could be returned for vendor credit, which couldn't, etc.
Nobody was ever disciplined or fired for abusing the breakage bin, but there were a few fired for other reasons - citing the breakage bin abuse instead of the actual reason for firing.
Seriously, though, I'd like to read more about Sears and the distribution solution. Wikipedia didn't really have anything. Any links?
No one seems to have described the "schedule system" in detail on line. It gets a brief mention in the Sears archives. Not much detail, though.
The obvious way to do fulfillment is to have order pickers, each with a few orders to pick, going through the storage aisles picking items, then delivering them to the packing and shipping area. That works if the inventory isn't too big. Safeway, for example, does on line shopping that way, with pickers running around retail grocery stories.
But the time to pick goes up with the size of the inventory, as the pickers have to travel further. The next idea is to divide up the orders by section, so that the items from each order are fanned out to different departments and picked by pickers in those departments. Then the picked partial orders have to be brought together for assembly. That creates a sorting problem, and as the volume goes up, the order assembly area tends to choke with work in progress.
The "schedule system" is a variant on picking by department. Orders are divided up by department at the front end of the process, where orders are read and pick slips produced. (Sears had to do this by hand in 1895, of course.) The pick slips specify a time slot and a bin number. Time slots were originally 45 minutes long. During a time slot, the pickers in each department work only on orders assigned to that time slot, picking items and putting them in small bins which travel on chutes and conveyors to the order assembly area, which has a receiving bin for each order being processed in that time slot. At the end of the time slot, the pickers switch to the next set of orders, even if something didn't get picked in time.
At the end of the time slot, all the bins in the order assembly area are replaced with empty bins, and the filled bins go to order checking and shipping. The original order is checked against the bin contents, anything missing is deducted from the charges and perhaps queued for another try on a later day, and the order is packed and shipped. Meanwhile, the next set of orders is being picked.
With this system, the pickers are only working on a moderate number of orders at a time, and only have to look within their own department. If they get behind during a time slot, some orders will be partially filled, and that gets caught in order assembly and retried. Order checking, packing, and shipping can be fanned out to as many assembly stations as necessary, and more stations can be staffed and brought on line if there's a backlog.
In the pre-computer era, this was a good way to coordinate an operation spread across acres of multi-story buildings. The order-checking phase of order assembly generates a ticket for each error, and those indicate what needed to be adjusted - too few pickers in one department, or too many out-of-stock reports from one department. It also provides a retry mechanism which doesn't stall out picking. This makes a huge operation manageable.
The biggest difference in modern fulfillment is that today, the inventory is known at the front end of order processing. If something is out of stock, no attempt is made to pick it. Manual systems have to carry more inventory to avoid pick fails. Systems today aren't tied to a rigid timetable, and there's a lot of bar coding and RFID tagging to track products and bins as they move around. But the fan-out-to-department and fan-in-to-assembly structure remains, since that's what gives the improvement from O(N*M) to O(N*log(M)). This is just like converting from a bubble sort to a merge sort.
This field is called "industrial engineering", which is about how to organize work so that it gets done efficiently. Anybody who supervises more than about 10 people needs to know the basics of this. Unfortunately, too many managers don't.