Amazon.com: New fulfillment center with ten times more robotics
A new Amazon.com logistics center in Louisiana uses technical solutions in all key areas for the first time.
View of an Amazon.com fulfillment center in Nashville, Tennessee.
Amazon.com has opened a new logistics center in Shreveport, Louisiana (USA), which the company says represents a new milestone in various areas. The new facility spans five floors and more than three million square meters. This makes it one of Amazon's largest logistics locations. According to current plans, 2,500 people will be employed there once it is fully operational.
In Shreveport, one of the poorest cities in the USA, the retail group says it has introduced technical solutions in all key productive areas of a site for the first time. This means that employees will be working with a growing fleet of robotic systems. At the center of this is a multi-level container system called Sequoia, which will be able to hold more than 30 million items. This makes it five times larger than Amazon's first system in Houston, Texas.
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Items will be sorted, stacked and consolidated according to customer orders by an AI-driven trio of robotic arms – named after the bird species Robin, Cardinal and Sparrow –. Amazon's first fully autonomous mobile robot, Proteus, navigates carts with packages to loading docks where the packages are loaded into trucks. According to Amazon, Proteus moves safely around employees in open areas.
(Image:Â Amazon.com)
According to the information provided, Amazon has improved operational safety in its facilities by over 30 percent in recent years. Among other things, the company attributes this to a reduction in heavy lifting work in these facilities.
All in all, the new fulfillment center contains ten times more robotics than the previous leader in this discipline among the company's logistics centers. However, all this technology does not run by itself: The Group plans to employ 30 percent more staff in the areas of reliability, maintenance and technology at the modern locations. Overall, however, Amazon anticipates lower expenditure. At peak times, the costs for deliveries at the new facility are expected to be a quarter lower.
The mail order company opened a sixth logistics center in North Rhine-Westphalia this summer. Hundreds of transport robots are in operation for Amazon.com in Horn-Bad Meinberg.
Note: The author was invited by Amazon.com to an event in Nashville, Tennessee. The company covered the travel costs. (nij)
