The Amazon warehouse that could hold 1.5m people

It’s no secret that Amazon is a global mega-company with resources to supply pretty much anything a customer could be looking for, and in many cases, they can have it to your door within a day of ordering. But have you ever wondered just where they keep so many items?

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The mega warehouse
We can reveal that one of their storage facilities is a huge warehouse (officially known as a ‘fulfillment centre’) near the North West Leicestershire market town of Coalville. This centre is so huge that you could fit 16 football pitches, or one and a half million people standing side by side, inside it! In numbers, this is 180,000 square meters.

Space to spare
Although around 800 people work there year round, and another 800 or so are employed to help deal with the extra pre-Christmas ordering boom, https://www.nottinghampost.com/news/jobs/amazon-looking-more-2000-staff- people who have been inside said you hardly even notice the people because there is simply so much space for them to be in.

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Part of the reason for this is that Amazon has made use of every inch of space possible. The warehouse is an extremely high building and equally tall shelving makes the most of what could easily be dead air. This is a great idea which could be easily adopted on a smaller scale by other businesses or even at home, in say, a garage. If you are looking for industrial shelving Ireland has specialists such as www.rackzone.ie/shelving/industrial-residential-shelving to maximize use of space.

Organisation is key
With such a huge number of products and space to store them, it’s vital to have a great organisational and retrieval system in place. Without that, too much time would be wasted searching for items which could take days to find. Surprisingly though the items in the warehouse are not generally stored together by type. This is deliberate to avoid mistakes by the pickers.

The process from start to finish
Goods are scanned when they arrive and the system gives them a reference number, which the picker uses to retrieve items ordered and deliver them to the packing station. There the computer calculates the box size and dispenses the tape needed to seal it before it sets off to the lorry and its journey to the distribution centre, and ultimately to the buyer’s home.

 

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