We design warehouses for people who walk or drive a fork lift. Amazon stopped doing that years ago.
A tour of an Amazon fulfillment center got me asking why distributors still move people toward product when the product could move instead. Hazmat keeps robots out of our warehouses, and there are still lessons in how Amazon rebuilt the question from scratch.
I toured an Amazon fulfillment center last year and walked away thinking about a question more than the robots roaming around the warehouse.
I kept asking myself why distributors still move humans toward product when the product itself could move. We optimize picker paths. We tweak slotting. We chase another two percent on the same old layout.
While you don’t want a robot moving thousands of pounds of hazardous material around the warehouse, there are still lessons to be learned from what you will see.
Amazon rebuilt the warehouse around a different starting question. Tour one yourself.
The question you bring back to your own warehouse will be a bigger one than you left with.