A year ago, Amazon.com workers like 34-year-old Rejinaldo Rosales walked the aisles each shift to find each item a customer ordered and prepare it for shipping.
Now the e-commerce giant boasts that it has boosted efficiency by deploying more than 15,000 wheeled robots to crisscross the floors of its biggest warehouses and deliver stacks of toys, books and other products to employees.
“We pick two to three times faster than we used to,” Rosales said during a break from sorting merchandise into bins at Amazon’s massive distribution center in Tracy, California. “It’s made the job a lot easier.”
Photo: Reuters
Amazon.com Inc, which expected to face its single biggest day of online shopping yesterday, has invested heavily this year in upgrading and expanding its distribution network, adding new technology, opening more shipping centers and hiring 80,000 seasonal workers to meet the coming onslaught of holiday orders.
Amazon says it processed orders for 36.8 million items on the Monday after Thanksgiving last year, and it expected “Cyber Monday” to be even busier this year.
Chief executive Jeff Bezos vows to one day deliver packages by drone, but that technology is not ready yet. Even so, Amazon does not want a repeat of last year, when some customers were disappointed by late deliveries attributed to ice storms in the US Midwest and last-minute shipping troubles at both UPS Inc and FedEx Corp. Meanwhile, the company is facing tough competition from rivals like Google Inc and eBay Inc, and traditional retailers are offering more online services.
Amazon has forecast revenue of US$27.3 billion to US$30.3 billion for the holiday quarter, up 18 percent from last year, but less than Wall Street had expected.
However, Amazon has invested billions of US dollars in its shipping network, and its reliability is a big selling point to customers, Piper Jaffray investment analyst Gene Munster wrote in a note to clients on Friday last week. He thinks Amazon’s forecast is conservative.
The Seattle-based company now has 109 shipping centers around the globe. The Tracy facility is one of 10 in which Amazon has deployed the robots, using technology acquired when the company bought robot-maker Kiva Systems Inc in 2012, said Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president for operations, who gave reporters a tour on Sunday.
More than 1,500 full-time employees work at the center. They are joined by about 3,000 robots, gliding swiftly and quietly around the warehouse. The robots navigate by scanning coded stickers on the floor, following digital commands that are beamed wirelessly from a central computer.
The system uses bar codes to track which items are on each shelf, so a robot can fetch the right shelves for each worker as orders come in.
The robots are expected to cut the Tracy center’s operating costs by 20 percent, Clark said. However, he was quick to say that they will not eliminate jobs.
“Our focus is all about building automation that helps people do their jobs better,” he said, adding that workers are needed for more complex tasks such as shelving, packing and checking for damaged items.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
Sanofi SA’s drug Dupixent succeeded in a late-stage trial for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), raising the odds that the blockbuster would be the first biologic medicine cleared to treat the lung disorder. Dupixent, which is already prescribed for asthma and some skin conditions, showed a 30 percent reduction in the rate at which patients’ COPD worsened compared with those who received a placebo during the stage-three Boreas trial, the company said in a statement yesterday. The positive data could herald a new era of cutting-edge treatments for the life-threatening respiratory affliction and provide another major boost in demand for the French
SEMICONDUCTOR EQUIPMENT: The international trade group said the sector would recover from a slump, with spending expected to rise 4.2 percent to US$24.9 billion Taiwan is to retain its position as the top spender on semiconductor front-end equipment and facilities next year, with spending expected to increase 4.2 percent year-on-year to US$24.9 billion, international trade group SEMI said yesterday. The spending forecast matches an expected recovery in global semiconductor equipment and facilities investment next year, it said. International equipment spending is to return to growth next year, SEMI said in a report, forecasting 21 percent growth to US$92 billion. The expansion would manly be driven by robust demand for semiconductors in the automotive and high-performance computing segments, the association said. “This quarter’s SEMI World Fab Forecast update
Three years after Luxembourg declared all public transport free in a bid to clear its roads of jams and cut pollution, the car is still king of the congested grand duchy. Traffic permitting, it is barely an hour’s drive from Weiswampach in the far north of Luxembourg near the German and Belgian borders to Dudelange in the south, next door to France. The wealthy country of just 650,000 people appeared the perfect place for a bold experiment — making public transport on trains, trams and buses free nationwide. However, Luxembourg, despite its lack of long-distance highways, has one of the highest rates
RSS