Some stow inventory, while others pick customer orders and still others grab those orders, placing them in the right size box and taping them up.
Interest in boxing technology sheds light on how the e-commerce behemoths are approaching one of the major problems in the logistics industry today: finding a robotic hand that can grasp diverse items without breaking them.Īmazon employs countless workers at each fulfillment center who do variations of this same task. Walmart started 3.5 years ago and has since installed the machines in several U.S. Five rows of workers at a facility can turn into two, supplemented by two CMC machines and one SmartPac, the person said. Including other machines known as the “SmartPac,” which the company rolled out recently to mail items in patented envelopes, Amazon’s technology suite will be able to automate a majority of its human packers. “It’s truly about efficiency and savings,” one of the people said. Though Amazon has announced it intends to speed up shipping across its Prime loyalty program, this latest round of automation is not focused on speed. The machines require one person to load customer orders, another to stock cardboard and glue and a technician to fix jams on occasion. They crank out 600 to 700 boxes per hour, or four to five times the rate of a human packer, the sources said. The new machines, known as the CartonWrap from Italian firm CMC Srl, pack much faster than humans. At the same time, employees that stay with the company can be trained to take up more technical roles.
Those have high turnover because boxing multiple orders per minute over 10 hours is taxing work. Rather than lay off workers, the person said, the world’s largest online retailer will one day refrain from refilling packing roles.
A key to its goal of a leaner workforce is attrition, one of the sources said.
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