Inside an Amazon Warehouse

redletterdave writes "In each one of Amazon.com's 80 fulfillment centers around the globe, Amazon relies on barcodes and human hands rather than robots or automation to find and ship the proper items in a quick and efficient manner. Without robots, Amazon utilizes a system known as 'chaotic storage,' where products are essentially shelved at random but are tagged with barcodes to be scanned at every step of the ordering, selection and shipping process. The real advantage to chaotic storage is that it's significantly more flexible than conventional storage systems. If there are big changes in a product range, the company doesn't need to plan for more space, because the products or their sales volumes don't need to be known or planned in advance if they're simply being stored at random. Free space is also better utilized in a chaotic storage system, and it's also a major time saver to not organize products as they come in. This system is the true key to Amazon.com's success in online retail."

Comments

My desk isn't a mess!

[Anonymous Coward]

I utilize a chaotic storage system.

Re:My desk isn't a mess!

[hughbar]

So do many [other?] three year olds. They also use the [probably patented] non-halting ransack method for search:

1. 1. Take something out of the toy box
2. 2. Put it back in somewhere else, if it's not the right thing
3. 3. Go to 1

But I bet Amazon are jealous of that highly advanced method...

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

It sounds like someone needs to run a defrag on those warehouses.

Re:Hmm...

[gagol]

Have you ever tried to get a teenager to defrag his room?

Re:Hmm...

[icebike]

Very easy to teach to someone, very easy to learn. You just better have some good running legs :)

I suspect that they don't run too far.

Seems unlikely they would pick an entire order, just the parts near their station.
Then they plop the tagged bin onto the conveyor which sends all the bins of a given order to a common location for boxing.

I'm guessing they get pick sheets for multiple orders at once (looking at the pictures seems to suggest they are picking into multiple bins in push carts) and the pick sheets are arranged in "elevator seeking" order so they can complete one planned circuit through their area, ending at the conveyor. Rinse Repeat.

As long as the person stocking the floor codes it into the computer correctly, there is little chance of losing anything. They probably arrange things more for the size and shape of the shelving and pick-bins used in a given floor section than anything else. Tiny parts in small drawers. All the books in a given area. Big items somewhere else. Looking at the pictures seems to confirm this.

Re:Hmm...

[strikethree]

Have you ever tried to get a teenager to defrag his room?

Yes. I tried for years and years. Then I had an idea which was quite weird. I told him that I do not care about his room, just no biological warfare lab stuff.

So one day, several months later, he asks if some friends can spend the night. I told him, "sure, not a problem."

The next day after his friends leave, he starts cleaning his room religiously and has kept it clean ever since. Why? Because he was embarassed by one of his friends comments on his room.

So simple. I wish I had thought of it earlier. I guess it depends on the friends though. Having a girl come over would have probably had the same effect.

May be an interesting slide show...

[wvmarle]

May be nice if that site works with the latest Firefox, too... been a while since I had an issue with a site just not working.

ADHD girl

[girlintraining]

My room is a disaster. My bed isn't made, nobody can find anything in here but me, and I have a couple bras right now hanging on the lamp to dry because there's nowhere else to put them. According to this article, I should be a major, successful retail vendor. So if that's true, instead of expecting me to be a billionaire or the President, my mom keeps telling me that at this point, she'd be happy if I'd just breed?

Re:ADHD girl

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Barcodes! You need barcodes!

Re:ADHD girl

[girlintraining]

Barcodes! You need barcodes!

To breed? Jeez... I knew I was missing something obvious.

Re:ADHD girl

[jamesh]

my mom keeps telling me that at this point, she'd be happy if I'd just breed?

Just don't breed with a fellow geek or your kids are likely to turn out just like you, only more so. Just like us male geeks should be going for the prettiest, bimboest, bikini babes we can find, you should be going for a handsome jock who prefers grunts to words. Have fun with that ;)

I married for beauty rather than for brains... unfortunately she turned out to be just as geeky as me and as a result my oldest daughter is almost too nerdy to function :)

Re:ADHD girl

[jones_supa]

My room is a disaster. My bed isn't made, nobody can find anything in here but me, and I have a couple bras right now hanging on the lamp to dry because there's nowhere else to put them. According to this article, I should be a major, successful retail vendor.

Correlation is not causation!

Re:ADHD girl

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, I think you missed the "intraining" part of girlintraining. No problem with the gender identification issue, but girlintraining is never going to bear a child via "natural" means in his/her lifetime without some major advances.

Re:ADHD girl

[smittyoneeach]

Has anybody ever told you that you are Secretary of State material?

Re:ADHD girl

[flyingfsck]

You mean Bracodes...

Re:ADHD girl

[sa1lnr]

Oh man, little do you know.

There's a veritable minefield of codes to navigate when it comes to women. :)

Re:ADHD girl

[silentcoder]

Breeding requires a male-to-female adaptor plug...

Re:ADHD girl

[Frosty Piss]

Breeding requires a male-to-female adaptor plug...

Only if you're gay, otherwise adapter plug not needed. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Re:ADHD girl

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, read her profile. She is naturally a she. She just likes girls. Which means she can bear natural children, if she chooses.

Walmart do the same

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've ever worked at Wallmart or I guess any of the other major supermarkets, they do the same thing. Store stuff whereever and track where it is. So it might be organized on the computer, but in the storerooms its real-world location bears no relation to it's computerized structure.

Again for the same reason, seasonality and holidays etc. mean the sales are not constants and stocks of different items vary, and with small space at the supermarket for storage, it doesn't make sense to dedicate empty space to storing *potential* stuff.

But hey, perhaps Bezo's plans to patent it, like one click ordering. So he's pretending it's a new thing.

Humans?

[DNS-and-BIND]

So, Amazon is refusing to invest in robots to do this repetitive work? Instead, they employ humans to perform mind-numbing running all over the place to fetch products and fill shipping boxes. Don't you think a company of Amazon's size should spend some of those billions on some modern industrial robots so that the humans can get a rest?

Re:Humans?

[Ozeroc]

Yeah, I've read that fulfulment warehouses are a terrible place to work: http://www.alternet.org/story/154344/what_happened_when_i_got_a_job_at_a_soul-crushing%2C_abusive_warehouse

Re:Humans?

[TheLink]

Not true. They bought Kiva. It probably takes a while before they work out the changes needed and roll that out.

As for humans getting rest, in many countries if you end up without a job and are not in the "ruling caste" the rest of the people don't seem to think you deserve to get any $$$$ for "resting" aka "doing nothing productive".

Careful for what you ask for, you may get it.

Re:Humans?

[uncqual]

As others have noted, Amazon purchased Zappos which utilizes Kiva in their warehouses. I expect Amazon to adapt Zappos models more than Amazon to migrate Zappos to their model. Every time a robot/computer replaces a human (been going on for 40 years), the fractional replacement human is a high skilled person than the multiple people they replaced. Think stocking -- the programmer costs a lot more and requires a lot more education than the human picker -- but the programmer's work can be deployed without limitations to service 6 billion people (and more later).

The first world societies have to understand real soon that they need to figure out what to do with the jobless masses with IQs under 110 in fifty years. The answer can't be "pay them to breed more crack babies", the answer has to be "each generation values breeding less and eduction more" - or expect their economy to sink under the economic sea like most of the PIGS probably will.

Re:Humans?

[Coriolis]

Or you could actually read the article that link points to and discover that your prejudices are incorrect. Educated people end up in these jobs too.

Re:Humans?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have worked at such a warehouse as christmas reinforcement, and can confirm the soul-crushingness of the job. The only reason I took it was I was in a spot where it was either take a last-minute job, or lose my apartment. The work is grueling, brainless, and people will hate you for every little fuckup that happens because it holds up the line. The routine is: Grab a bin from the conveyor belt, find the entries on the included list that are located in your division, put labels on them, put them in the bin, and send it on its way. For 12 hours a day. Nobody talks to anybody. It's not that they're bad people, it's just that there's no room for any sort of socializing, or anything that would help boost morale. The hallways and bathrooms are covered in motivational and anti-alcohol/drug posters. I know I'd drink if that were my full-time job.

My paycheck at the end of the month ended up covering half my rent. Entirely unlivable, and definitely a job that should and could be done 95% by robots. Luckily I ended up getting a job the next month that paid nearly 5x that.

capcha: merchant

Re:Humans?

[SirGarlon]

The first world societies have to understand real soon that they need to figure out what to do with the jobless masses with IQs under 110 in fifty years.

Well, the problem of "masses" is taking care of itself. No need for government policy there; market forces are driving population growth down.

As to the "IQ under 110," there are lots of productive and necessary jobs that can't easily be automated. It's going to be a long time before a robot can cook a gourmet meal or repair a leaky faucet or give me a good haircut.

One doesn't need to be educated or even terribly smart to be a productive member of society. One just needs a work ethic.

Re:Humans?

[Applekid]

And people point to worker conditions in China about slave wages, long hours, and suicidal tenancies. Compared to Amazon warehouses, though, these Chinese workers get lots more money working at some horrible factory in Guandong than their peers, while in the US, the pay still can't sustain a living.

Yet hedge fund managers...

Re:Humans?

[akb]

This article about what it was like at an Amazon fulfillment center in PA. Backbreaking work with ever increasing demands topped off with many workers passing out from heatstroke. Inside Amazon's Warehouse: Lehigh Valley workers tell of brutal heat, dizzying pace at online retailer

... yeah, real nice.

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon warehouse jobs push workers to physical limit
http://seattletimes.com/html/businesstechnology/2017901782_amazonwarehouse04.html

I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-free-online-shipping-warehouses-labor

Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Why do that, when you can have an organized directory structure and searchable file tags? The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know.

Humans vs. Robots

[gentryx]

Chaotic storage works because the barcode of each shelved item is scanned together with the barcode of its shelve, so that the computer can later on tell the humans where to find the stuff for a certain order.

Apparently there is no reason why this wouldn't work with robots. Apparently robots are still to expensive or not smart (in terms of physical skills) enough.I wonder when we'll see Amazon experimenting with robots.

Re:Humans vs. Robots

[wvmarle]

It's likely mostly the physical skill of opening a wrapper and taking a book out of it. Or worse, some odd shaped item. That's stuck in the tight wrapper.

The first (and only photo visible to me) on that that site showed a bunch of shipping pallets aligned haphazardly with cartons stacked on top of them. Assuming one item per pallet, you go find the pallet (easy), then find which carton is currently open already (harder), then manouvre your arms and hands to take an item out of the carton (that's the tough one - especially the getting your fingers around it part), and place it in your shopping trolley or whatever they use there (easy again).

Finding and scanning bar codes may also be tricky, as they're likely not on fixed locations.

Current robots work where a blind man could work. They are as good as blind, after all. And need to know exactly where to find a product, and how to take one and only one. That's not easy with all those odd shaped, and constantly changing products.

Re:Humans vs. Robots

[wvmarle]

There is a simple reason everything comes in different sized cartons: all products are different size. Outer and inner cartons must be full and not leave any room for a product to move around in it, or it would be damaged in transport. So unless you standardise the size of all your products, that's not going to work.

Standardising carton sizes would result in having to add heaps of filler material (adds cost: material and labour) and wasting space in trucks and shipping containers (adds more cost: less payload per job). That filler material will also mess up your robotics seriously - you still don't know where your product really is, and have more stuff to dig through.

Really, your "laughably easy" solution is just not a solution. Otherwise it would have been done already, look at other parts of transport: the Euro pallet has a size that makes them fit perfectly in rail road cars. Trucks are now being built to fit Euro pallets perfectly. And as much as possible, cartons are made to fit those pallets perfectly. For overseas transport, a 40' shipping container fits twenty standard pallets (1x1.2m) with very little room to spare. And manufacturers will make sure that their cartons stay as close as possible within those measurements. Big bags have a 1x1m footprint, and while their height may vary, the regular heights allow them to be stacked two or three on top of each other for a perfect fit.

Re:FOSS Inventory management recomendations

[damnbunni]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Bundy

Don't ever plan on getting old then.

[tebee]

I use very much the same system in my room. Worked fine when I was young, had a brilliant memory and knew where everything was. Now I'm at the "get off my lawn" age, I forget where I put things within two minites of putting them down, Spend half my life looking for things.

Would get myself organised, but at my age the payback time is probably not worth the time spent doing it.

Not all roses...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a fulfilment centre myself, and i can say that while the storage is very efficient, as mentioned, the algorithms that rout pickers to collect the various items leave a lot to be desired. Its all well and good having ingenious storage systems, but if you have to spend 2 minutes walking to a particular shelf location to collect item X passing 8 different bins containing item X along the way, it wastes huge amounts of time and effort. For example, our fulfilment centre is LOSING $250000 due simply to pick-routing inefficiencies...

Re:Not all roses...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason you have to go to a particular bin is that the company likely runs a FIFO inventory system, so they want you to pick the oldest items first. There are various good reasons to do this (we do it too in normal manufacturing inventory).

Re:Not all roses...

[necro81]

"Shortest Route" algorithms, such as the traveling salesman problem, are extremely difficult. Sometimes humans can intuit a better solution, but only when the number of spots to hit is small. For a warehouse with millions of items not already organized, it's impossible for a human. The best you can hope for without throwing using every computer on the planet is an approximate solution, which again for large datasets isn't really guaranteed to be all that good.

Re:Not all roses...

[hibiki_r]

The traveling salesman only becomes hell when the number of stops is very high, and it is relatively expensive to know the cheapest route before point A and point B. The thing is, neither of those is true in a warehouse.

I don't know how long a typical route is for an Amazon picker, but when I was writing warehouse software, pickers were only getting about a dozen items per trip: typically far larger than a book. With so few items, and a warehouse that is not really a random graph, we were able to get extremely good solutions for picking. As an approximation, just try to a mock traveling salesman problem in a square grid, where you can only travel on both axis.

Re:Not all roses...

[Whatsisname]

There are in the scientific literature published algorithms that produce approximate results well in the "good enough" range, 2-5% larger than optimal, to be worthwhile. For large and small datasets, with millions of points.

Furthermore, it doesn't matter that the warehouse has millions of items, the complexity of the problem depends only on the size of the order, or the sizes of how many orders can be fit in your rolly bin.

Re:Not all roses...

[Hulfs]

As someone who spent some time several years ago developing a picking algorithm for plumbing / electrical warehouses, there's generally much more to it than just a simple scanning / shortest path equation. You'll generally want to make sure you're going through your older stock first so you don't end up with old, unsellable stock, sometimes you want to actually clear out bins that have only a few items in them to make room for more stock, and many more things. So, just because you may walk by a few bins that have your item in it already doesn't mean the algorithm is dumb (though it very well may mean that), it may mean that those who set up the system assigned higher value to other picking / service priorities than just pick speed.

Breaking News From 2107

[smittyoneeach]

Amazon announces that, after a century of tweaking about, they have arrived at a self-replicating fulfillment warehouse system.
Everything is on 23 pairs of rows. The tips of the 23 rows of two warehouses break off intermittently, and circulate freely on the roadways disguised as traffic.
If any two sets of 23 show up in a fulfillment center parking lot and collide, a new fulfillment center is 'conceived', and 'gestates' for a few seasons before making a the shortest possible journey to a new location, where it starts doin' its thang'. A shocking amount of the row storage is metadata, such that a warehouse query fails outright or returns a product at roughly ludicrous speed. "Yeah, it's kind of a b-tree on Brawndo," said Dr. Joey "TT" Torvalds-Tridgell, the 800lb Brain of Amazon.
In other news, Walmart President Sanger is seeking to legalize the abortion of this burgeoning threat, saying that wanton murder, too, is a form of capitalism.

Re:Sounds similar to a certain filesystem...

[JaredOfEuropa]

It works for email. I get rather a lot of it and I have stopped filing it in neat little folders; instead all mail goes into an "archive" folder. Some time management methods like GTD recommend this: do not waste too much time on filing stuff, just throw it on the pile and rely on search to find it later.

How can this work?

[ShooterNeo]

Since there's no organizational scheme, I assume that the human workers have to be told turn by turn where to go? That for anything but an item that they picked up recently, a human worker would need to be told where exactly to go to pick up the nearest item X. And even if one of the human workers did remember the last place they saw X, that spot probably is not the closest instance of X. This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.

Re:How can this work?

[Anonymous Coward]

You think this is bad ? Then take a look at the future: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWY8uFlteIM

Now that is a meat waldo.

Oh I so want that!

[SmallFurryCreature]

Just imagine, a girl with all the bits labeled with barcodes so you can scan them and google the manual for it! And easily order replacement parts.

Re:Oh I so want that!

[JustOK]

You still have to do it manually.

True key to success

[agentgonzo]

"This system is the true key to Amazon.com's success in online retail". That, and not paying any tax.

Barcode bugger-ups: big problem.

[Bieeanda]

A few years back, someone ordered a book for me from Amazon. The package arrived as normal, but it was a completely different book inside, and one that I already had. So the sender got in touch with Amazon, the order was double-checked, and after some back and forth they sent a new package out.

The second package had the same book in it.

So did the third.

It turns out that for some reason, possibly because they were part of the same product line, these two books were assigned the same Amazon-internal barcode. Because of this I never got the book that was ordered, but instead ended with two copies of the book that was mistakenly sent, and a credit for the cost of the original order.

What might have been an easily remedied issue, had storage followed a logical pattern and the fulfillment person given enough autonomy to detect and solve the problem, ended up taking months to get to the bottom of.

It works great

[sjbe]

Since there's no organizational scheme, I assume that the human workers have to be told turn by turn where to go?

There is an organizational scheme, it's just not by by product and workers will be told where to go regardless of what storage system the company uses. I implemented a version of this about 10 years ago in our warehouse for an auction company I owned. Basically you build a warehouse with identifiers on the shelving system. Then you assign a random and (this is the important bit) uniformly distributed code to each box/pallet/SKU that you store. You can't tell where a product is by the product, you have to look up the location in the computer but after that it's easy to find. This system works really well when you have a wide array of rapidly changing merchandise that you can't predict arrival times or quantities for. Amazon would be a great fit for a warehousing system like this.

This kind of storage scheme means that the human workers are simply meat waldos serving the computer software that runs the place.

That's true for pretty much all warehouses regardless of organizational scheme. Once you get to a warehouse of any size you have to have a computer to direct where to find merchandise to pick to an order. Even if the worker knows where to get it they still will need direction from the computer on quantities to pick.

Chaotic works sometimes

[aitikin]

But when you start adding foodstuffs and chemicals, you'll run into complications and be forced to keep them separate by legal regulation. That's probably part of the reason Amazon's so slow/not getting into foodstuffs.

Link to photos

[pancake_lover]

The article slideshow isn[t working for me. Some photos from an Amazon warehouse were posted on reddit the other day. Here are those photos: http://imgur.com/a/q1WIO.

Not so terrible

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a fulfillment warehouse and it's actually a great place to work. Granted, I'm an office geek but we take care of our hourly workers very well. Everything we do to modify the shipping process (basically an assembly line) is to make things not only quicker but easier on the workers as well. Everyone is encouraged to make contributions to the team and there is plenty of opportunity to move up, get raises etc. Benefits are excellent and the pay is good. Nobody gets chewed out for making a mistake, we just look at the process itself and how we can prevent such a mistake in the future by doing things differently. Why would you run it any other way? The people packing the boxes can make or break the place. It pays to keep them happy and caring about their jobs.

slideshow pictures for non-working browsers:

[SETY]

http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/article_slideshow_slide/public/2012/11/29/amazon-warehouse-1.jpg
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Re:true key

[Anonymous Coward]

That was step 1. We're at the end of step 2 now. Run razor thin margins while continuing to grow and build efficiency while fighting taxation of online sales. Step 3 is support taxes knowing that your potential competition has either been eliminated or sufficiently crippled, and this will keep them that way. Step 4 will be raise prices and profit.

As The Register pointed out yesterday, thanks to AWS/S3/etc, Amazon may very well have the rest of the world paying its datacenter costs now.