Amazon’s New Fulfillment Center

Everyone knows that Amazon is the world’s biggest ecommerce platform. It processes millions of sales each year and generates billions of dollars in revenue. In fact, Amazon is worth $1.1 trillion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world. It is constantly updating and increasing its warehousing capabilities, and its newest one is truly a sight to behold.

The New Fulfillment Center

The latest fulfillment center is Amazon’s first-ever New York City-based center, and it opened its doors for business in September 2018 in Staten Island. It brought with it some 3,000 new jobs and is expected to help generate incredible revenue for the borough. This new facility is designed specifically to process orders for packages that are less than 18 inches in size and nonperishable, so if you live in the region and you order a pack of pens, some light bulbs, or perhaps even a keychain, there’s a very good possibility it will come from this specific center. Almost every item in the facility weighs less than 25 pounds. 

The Sheer Size

Though no exact measurements have been given, Amazon’s NYC fulfillment center boasts hundreds of thousands of square feet of space, and it can easily hold 18 football fields inside it. Within its walls are roughly 1000 employees at any given time, numerous robots moving gracefully between rows picking containers of items to bring to human employees for more precise picking, and dozens of forklifts making their rounds to stock the very same containers the robots bring to the employees.

Safety First

For an employee to safely walk between the stacks and stacks of products, the moving forklifts, and the moving robots that are constantly zipping by, he or she must wear several pieces of technology. This includes computers on both hips, a walkie-talkie for communicating with others, and a flashing light to communicate with the robots. These employees also carry around a high-tech tablet that shows a virtual display of their current area and the location of each robot in real time. If a robot gets too close, it can read the sensors the employees wear and slow down or even stop. Should an item fall, the employee will be notified immediately, and there is an entire team of people dedicated to retrieving these items, as well. 

Real People Check Orders

Though technology is a huge part of the new Amazon fulfillment center in NYC and it helps them process numerous orders 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are still very real people checking your orders and shipping them out to you. In fact, many products in the center are still packed by hand, and the people who put the items in the boxes work hard to make sure they are well-protected – just the way they would expect to see their packages if they opened them at home. 

The new Staten Island Amazon fulfillment center is massive, to say the least, and it houses millions upon millions of items that go into boxes and ship out across the country every single day. It’s the perfect example of how technology and human judgment can work together, and thanks to Amazon’s ability to put new ideas to the test, smaller companies can follow in their footsteps to help make ecommerce fulfillment a little less complicated for small to medium businesses.