Liz Young of The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon’s new 3 million-square-foot distribution center in Shreveport, La., demonstrates the limits of automation in big logistics operations. Young writes:
Amazon just opened its most-automated warehouse yet. But underneath the robotics and artificial-intelligence technology at the site, the facility will still rely on thousands of employees.
The e-commerce behemoth said its 3 million-square-foot building in Shreveport, La., is its first warehouse to use automation and artificial intelligence at every step of the fulfillment process.
The facility, opened in the midst of the frantic holiday retail season that pushes many millions of added shipments through fulfillment networks, shows how companies are spreading automation through their distribution centers to get online orders to consumers at an ever faster pace.
Amazon wants to use robots for physically demanding and repetitive warehouse tasks. Photo: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg NewsThe sprawling site also demonstrates the challenges Amazon and other companies face as they seek to turn over some of the most physically demanding and repetitive warehouse tasks to robots. […]
Some traditional warehouse roles have proved too difficult for Amazon to fully automate, however, partly because the company sells more than 400 million widely varied products that range in size, weight and fragility, from dog toys to toaster ovens, said Rueben Scriven, research manager for the warehouse automation sector at research firm Interact Analysis.
“If you don’t know what items you’re going to be handling, it makes it very difficult to create an automated system that’s flexible enough to handle the various items,” Scriven said. […]
Those systems aren’t picking through bins to find individual items customers have ordered, Brady said. “That’s a holy grail in robotics. We’re not doing that yet,” he said.
Instead, robots at the facility carry storage containers full of merchandise to human employees who look inside and pick out the item a customer ordered, then place that item into a tote box that goes onto a conveyor belt and is taken to be packaged. […]
Brady said Amazon warehouses using its latest automation will be able to handle one million orders a day, creating many opportunities for issues that require a human touch. “As we become more productive, we have more throughput, and we also generate more exceptions,” he said.
Amazon plans to start rolling out some of the technology at the Shreveport building to other warehouses across the U.S. next year, Brady said.
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