Operations Management: Amazon Warehousing Management Essay

Operations Management: Amazon Warehousing
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Operations Management: Amazon Warehousing
The productivity of a company depends on how the operations manager(s) utilize the available resources and technologies to serve the customers’ needs. Operations management ensures efficiency in the operations of organizations through finding the balance between the customer preferences, company capabilities, and the global attainments and trends of the process(s). Some of the customers' needs that organizations should adhere to in the operations management considerations include quality, timeliness, and flexibility. At the same time, company capabilities comprise the staff, equipment, and operational strategies and business layouts. The coordination of all the operations and processes to ensure optimal productivity and competitive advantage is the duty of operations management. International organizations have various activities that can be independent or interlinked depending on the supply chain but are coordinated to ensure customer satisfaction. Amazon is one of the most successful technology companies that have a broad customer base due to the variety in its products. The e-commerce segment dealing with retail goods requires warehousing where the store can package and sort the assets for shipping and delivery. The warehouse, otherwise called fulfillment centers, form a significant part of adding value to the services through the quality checking, packing, sorting, and direction for the final destination. This indicates that the warehousing process covers from receiving the goods from the suppliers through packaging them to preparation for shipping. This text studies the management of the warehousing at Amazon highlighting the operational advantages and challenges that the company undergoes in service delivery.
Otherwise known as fulfillment centers, Amazon warehouses contain the processes that ensure that the ‘same-day delivery' ideology is achieved, as they are hubs of the company's logistic coordination (Simon, 2019). The warehousing operation constitutes different processes like picking, packing, and shipping orders within the required timeframe and efficiency (About Amazon Staff, n.d.). This indicates that it is within these centers that Amazon receives the good from its suppliers, stores and distributes them to the respective customers. They act as the station between the supplier and the consumer where the products are checked of quality, customized to the needs of the clients, and shipped. According to formaspace.com (2014), the Company has more than 75 million square feet and a potential to increase to the increased customer base and trends that it has to strive to cover.
Although there are different types of warehouses, each engineered according to the product type and specific customer needs, they serve similar purposes of ensuring that the goods are checked and aligned in terms of quality, design, and packaging according to the customer specifications. According to aboutamazon.com, the different types of warehouses that the Company has to include sortable and non-sortable fulfillment centers that involve picking, packing, and shipping small products like books and bulky items like heavy equipment respectively. Sortationcenters require end-user customers based on physical location and time, while receive centers are anticipatory warehouses that cater to projected large-scale product sales. The store also operates other warehouses dedicated to peak seasons and/or particular items known as specialty fulfillment centers.
What makes warehousing important to Amazon is that it is the only stage in the operations management that the Company handles the goods before handing them to shipment companies and trucks for international and local deliveries, respectively. The warehouses act as temporary holding spaces as the company processes and organize the inventory to cover the orders and manage the supply and demand of its products as well as check the product for value standards (Sundaran, 2019. After the arrival to the warehouse, the products are then aligned towards the needs of the customers who order from the Amazon stores. The availability in the warehouses ensures the efficiency and the allotment of the products according to the labels, types, and location chose from the nearest store to ensure that the customer receives their orders in time. This means that the warehousing process in Amazon adds value to the service it offers by ensuring availability and flexibility.
Input-transformation-output analysis of Amazon warehousing
After a supplier sends their inventory to Amazon with the proposed products and their corresponding information, and they are accepted, they become the primary inputs that require added value to appease the customers’ needs. Detailing his work at Amazon, Simon (2019) explained how the human beings, after scanning and labeling the products, load them to robotics for transfer to the channels for trucking and other means of delivery. The work involves examining the goods both for quality as per Amazon requirements and the description and packaging to the satisfaction of the customer. The people who work in the fulfillment rooms range from IT consultants for the robotic operations, and the human resource for manual coding and loading to trucks and the robots (About Amazon Staff, n.d.).
This categorization makes the un-scanned, unpackaged goods the primary inputs of the warehousing operation. This is because they are the raw materials that require transformation through the facilitation of the secondary inputs. The human resource involved in the scanning and packaging of the goods is one of the secondary resources as they sort it according to the specified quantities and serving the required timeline simultaneously. The robots and their facilitators are also involved in the processing of the products through the accordance placement to the right trucks for delivery and shipping. Amazon’s warehousing strategy and the ability to control the robotics and schedule their performance are the tertiary outputs as they control the scheduling and the branding according to the demands from the market trends dictated by the received orders. The main aim of the scanning, packaging, and schedule is to entail customer satisfaction through meeting their demand of product specificity and time adherence. This means that the end products and customer satisfaction are the primary and secondary outputs, respectively. The diagram below illustrates the input-transformation-output processes of the warehousing operation in Amazon.
Fig 1, Input transformation output diagram of Amazon Inc.
The Process Mapping of Amazon Fulfillment Centers
Process mapping refers to the stage-by-stage evaluation of the progression of activities, the communication channels between the stakeholders, and the turn points in decision-makingas well as the resulting product of each step. The process map shows each step independently covering its facilitation, product, the distinguishing boundaries from other processes, and its entailments. In the Amazon fulfillment centers, the process mapping begins from the inventory entry to the warehouse to the trucks. The operation is only constricted to the activities within the warehouse, which cover the receipt and the release of goods into and from the facilities. The following steps can be realized from the Amazon warehousing strategy.
Step 1- At Amazon, the seller contacts the Company with the listings that they need fulfilled and sending the inventory with the required information, including the type and quantity of product, the labeling requirements (if Amazon is responsible), and the shipping details (Sundaran, 2019). The reception is the first step of the warehousing strategy as the other steps stem from the products availed by the suppliers, which are then customized to suit the suppliers' requirements of the customers' needs.
Step 2- the next step involves the verification of the labeling requirements to see if they conform to the Company's international shipments standards. This comes if the seller decides to do the labeling themselves instead of letting Amazon fulfill it for them, of course, at a fee. Labeling becomes the second step if the supplier solicits the help of Amazon in labeling the goods. The resources required here are the shipment standards as well as the labeling fee for the suppliers.
Step 3- the third step entails value addition to the inspected goods through scanning for coding and inventory management. The products are then packed and assigned codes according to the customer needs for location and time. This process uses automated systems for coding and identification and human resource to facilitate the process.
Step 4- the last step includes the movement of the labeled items to the previous aisle awaiting shipment. This process involves both human resources and the robots who move the items to the designated trucks for transport.
Each of the steps varies in time depending on the quantity, amount, and bulkiness, and the efficiency of the system. The diagram below represents the process map of Amazon fulfillment warehouses.
Scanning and coding for temporary shelving Packaged?Check packaging requirement sPackage for the unpackaged Checking for customer specifications and location Inventory from suppliers YesNoCustomer OrderPlacing them into trucks for shipping Fig. 2, the process map for the warehousing operation at Amazon
Definitions of symbols used in the diagram.
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