Inside Amazon’s BIGGEST Warehouse Full Of ROBOTS!

From manufacturing to distribution of goods and services, the need for massive commercial facilities continues to grow, perhaps due to changes in consumer habits where goods are expected to be readily available and delivered to them quickly upon placing an order. It is no wonder that mega-sized warehouses are required to accommodate the requirement of customers. Warehouse space is vital in ensuring supply chains run smoothly, and Amazon hasn't disappointed us with this. Even no one does it better than Amazon.
Amazon, the biggest world retailer, is very popular and better ever at giving people what they want; quickly, Amazon has transformed online shopping by making the delivery process fast, cheap, and relatively painless for consumers. One major way Amazon has achieved this goal is by building out a sprawling network of warehouses worldwide.
Amazon operates hundreds of world-class facilities in cities and communities worldwide to get customers what they need efficiently. Now, let’s take a look at the inside of Amazon’s biggest warehouse.
Amazon warehouse, also known as a fulfillment center, is a unique 21st-century creation, a vast, networked, intelligent engine for sating consumer desire. Amazon launched its warehouse network in 1997, starting with two fulfillment centers in Seattle, Washington, and New Castle, Delaware. Within the last two decades, Amazon fulfillment centers have popped up in almost every corner of the U.S., as well as across the globe, as the company has pushed to bring items closer to customers to enable faster deliveries.
Amazon warehouses store products and serve as distribution centers where workers pick, pack, and ship orders quickly and efficiently. Amazon robotics, scanning machines, and computer systems in fulfillment centers can track millions of items in a day. The fulfillment center is the anchor of Amazon's physical operations, the brick, and mortar behind the virtual button you tap on your phone to summon clothes, bags, shoes, a garden hose, or Cards.
Through the engineering of its fulfillment centers, Amazon has built the world's most nimble infrastructure for the transfer of things, a logistics platform that dramatically amplifies any one person's ability to move the matter to anyone else.
Out of the many fulfillment centers or distribution centers operated by Amazon, its facility at Tilbury just outside London is the company's largest, which stretches at 2 million square feet or 186 000 square meters. As with all Amazon fulfillment centers, the LCY2 facility is named after the closest airport with the number 2, meaning it is the second to be built near London City. This fulfillment center is made up of state-of-the-art technology. As the biggest and the most advanced warehouse, it is home to thousands of robots that navigate the aisles using the QR codes on the floor, helping human workers pick items ready for dispatch.
The huge structure sits in a massive space surrounded by parking lots. Inside, a vast web of conveyor belts crisscrosses the building, moving between areas where workers stow products into robotic shelves and areas where the workers pick items up from the shelves. There are also workstations where people package the items for shipping. Much of the building naturally have little human interaction because the work areas are spaced far apart.
The warehouse has various centers, buildings, and facilities divided by functions, allowing Amazon to support and fulfill orders for products as big as a canoe or hot tub or as quirky as a five-pound gummy bear Halloween costume for your pet.
The facility is divided, starting with the sortable fulfillment center, where employees pick and pack customer orders such as books, toys, and housewares. Thanks to the innovations of Amazon Robotics, workers often work alongside robots to help create a more efficient process to meet up customer’s demands.
The non-sortable fulfillment center is another center where employees pick and pack bulky or larger-sized customer items such as patio furniture, outdoor equipment, or rugs. The next is the sortation center, where employees sort customer orders by final destination and consolidate them onto trucks for faster delivery.
The receiving center is another part of the fulfillment center where amazon supports customer fulfillment by taking in large orders of the types of inventory that we expect to quickly sell and allocating it to fulfillment centers within the network.
Another interesting part of the warehouse is the specialty center, where specific categories of items or are pressed into service at peak times of the year, such as the holiday season.
Delivery stations are, of course, an important section of the supply chain. In these buildings, customer orders are prepared for last-mile delivery to customers. Amazon delivery providers enable fast, standard shipping.
So how do the fulfillment centers work, from receiving orders to picking items required, packaging, and delivery?