FORT WORTH (1080 KRLD) - When you order an item from Amazon, have you ever wondered about the process involved in getting your item from your screen to your front door?
Recently, KRLD took a tour of the Amazon fulfillment center in Fort Worth/Haslet.
It's one of six Amazon fulfillment centers in North Texas and more than 175 worldwide.
The Fort Worth/Haslet fulfillment center, dubbed DFW7, contains more than 20-million items, all of which fit into a bin roughly the size of a small microwave.
Larger items, such as musical instruments and furniture, come from other fulfillment centers.
The fulfillment center uses robots to deliver the items to the associates, so that they do not have to go running all over the 1.1-million-square-foot warehouse to look for the item ordered.
"Once an order is placed, an associate receives that at their station," says Maxine Gray with Amazon public relations, "and then they start the process of picking that order based on the technology of the robot delivering the inventory pod to their specific pick station."
And with computer screens indicating the item's exact location on the inventory pod, associates can fill several orders in a timely manner.
Using barcode labels, associates down the chain know exactly which order goes to which customer.
Amazon's technology also takes the guesswork out of the boxing process.
"The system is communicating based on what we know is inside of the yellow tote," says Gray, "and then communicating with the associate with the information on the screen as far as what (size) box to select as well as how to utilize the tape machine to print out the exact size same that they need for that particular box."
By dispensing only the right amount of tape — no more and no less — that helps keep Amazon's costs down.
Once the item is boxed, it goes down a conveyor belt, where one machine scans the barcode, while another machine uses that information to print out the label and stick it to the box.
Finally, the boxes are pushed down chutes to distribution trucks, whether it be through a shipping partner like FedEx or UPS, or Amazon's own delivery vehicles that can get the item to the customer that same day, sometimes within an hour for Prime customers.
"Our goal is customer obsession," says Gray, "so our goal is to deliver and meet and exceed our customers' expectations."
As advanced as Amazon's technology is, it's still constantly evolving.
"This is a way to ensure that we continue to improve, but that we also eliminate potential errors," says Gray. "So through this process of ensuring that we have the right products inside of the right package, we hope to eliminate some of those errors."
The DFW7 fulfillment center, located at 700 Westport Pkwy. in far north Fort Worth, is open to free public tours.
The tours, which last about an hour, are offered Monday through Friday at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., January through October (no tours are available November and December, due to the busy holiday shopping season).
For more information and to book a tour, visit amazonfctours.com.
