“So, Frank Mitchell?”
“Follow me.”
Chapter 35
Ross led Decker to a door at the end of the hall. It opened up to a mezzanine with a bird’s-eye view of the vast main floor.
“I have that window in my office so I can keep an eye on people coming and going in the management section,” said Ross. “But here is where I really focus a lot of my attention. Because this is where the money is made.”
Decker looked out over a sea of shelving and miles of conveyor belts, and people and both fixed and mobile robots working in seemingly perfect synchronization.
“Looks like a lot of moving pieces,” he noted.
“This place is one big algorithm,” said Ross, nodding. “But the general concept is pretty simple. We get product in and we have to get product out as fast and as accurately as possible.”
He pointed to the back side of the facility where the loading docks were located. “Product coming off the trucks is opened, scanned, and put in those blue totes. The conveyor belts you’re seeing route it to different parts of the FC.” He looked at Decker. “Short for ‘fulfillment center.’ Once it gets to its destination inside here it’s unloaded and scanned again, along with a barcode scan of its cubby location on the shelves.”
“Cubby location?” asked Decker.
“Right. All the metal shelving you see is divided into small cubbies with barcodes and alphanumeric IDs. It’s kind of like the old library catalog card system, only now it’s digital. When orders come in, and they do at the rate of hundreds per second, the pickers — they’re the ones in the yellow vests — use handheld scanners to find the product to fill the order. They scan the item and place it in the tote. Once the tote is full, it goes to the conveyor belt system.”
“How does it get there?”
“Either by humans carrying it or using rolling carts, or robots do the task.” He pointed to one device rolling along that looked like a large upright vacuum. “That’s an AMR, which stands for autonomous mobile robot. It carries the full tote to the belts using embedded intelligence and application software, its brain if you will.”
He pointed to another device that was carrying a large shelving unit. “That’s a lifting robot. It looks like one of those robot vacuum cleaners, but it can hoist thousands of pounds on those specially built shelving pods. It moves on a predefined grid system to where it needs to go.”
Ross indicated another section of the facility.
“Now, the products arrive there, at the prepackaging stations. The items are sorted into small slots on tall wheeled shelves. Each slot equals one order, because now you’re going from bulk to individual orders and the funnel gets really narrow. You deliver the wrong stuff to someone, well, that’s not good. The shelves are then rolled to the packaging stations, where they’re packed for shipment.”
“By people, I see,” said Decker.
“Robots can’t really pack. At least not yet. An algorithm spits out the right-sized box for each order, rollers kick out the air cushion bags for packing the item in the box as well as the tape to seal it. Then it goes down the belt to the labeling machine where the mailing label is put on. Then it goes to the loading docks where the boxes are put on trucks. Sort of like a jigsaw puzzle because every truck has to be packed as tightly as possible. A couple of wasted inches matters when you’re shipping millions of packages.”
“And people load the trucks as well?”
“Yeah, robots can’t do that either. Yet.”
“You keep saying yet.”
Ross looked at him. “There’s one major problem with robots. They don’t have hands like humans. You see those fixed robotic arms over there?”
Decker glanced where he was pointing to see a row of large metal arms lifting huge pallets onto high shelves at the back of the facility.
Ross said, “Now, that’s a great application for a robot. Weights that humans can’t lift safely. One direction, one spot to place it on. It does not require fine motor skills, only brute strength. Humans can feel things with their hands and work in small spaces in ways that robots can’t right now. They can make snap judgments about moving something an inch here or there because it works better. They can also recognize new products they may never have seen before and be able to deal with them on the fly. Right now, robots can’t do that reliably. But the industry is working on it. In fact, the Holy Grail in the FC business is something called reliable grasping mechanisms, which is a fancy term for making robots act more human when they’re picking up things and putting them in specific places. It’ll get solved one day, because people get sick, take bathroom breaks, eat lunch, get tired, and need a vacation and health care insurance. With robots all those things go away.”
“So you’re saying one day this place will just have robots?”
“Businesses don’t give a crap about creating jobs. They care about making money. With robots, you’ll just need some tech guys to maintain and repair them.”
“But if people don’t have jobs to make money, who’s going to buy all the stuff on those shelves?” asked Decker.
Ross grinned. “I don’t think the rich guys have thought that one through. Probably leaving it for the government to figure out. God help us if that’s the case.”
Decker pointed to a set of doors along a far wall. “Are those magnetometers?”
“Yes. That’s the employee entrance. We call our employees ‘associates.’ Anyway, as with any business, you have to deal with theft. They have to go through the magnetometers and also have their bags searched.”
“Does everybody have to go through it?” asked Decker.
“Yep, me included.”
“I understand the physical demands of working here are pretty tough.”
“We have to fill about four hundred orders a second, so it’s nonstop movement. A picker’s handheld device will receive a ping every time an order is placed. And the system directs the picker to the shelf where that item is. And the process starts. The workers here have to be able to lift about fifty pounds and walk or stand for up to twelve hours a day. And you’ll probably end up walking fifteen miles in a shift. But, hey, walking is good exercise, right? I make my rounds every day at the same time, checking on things.” He looked at his watch. “In fact, I’ll be heading out in about an hour to do just that. I get to hobnob with the workers, and it’s good for them to see management out there on the floor. But it’s not all fun and games. I have other managers on the floor and their job is to make sure the work gets done. We ride the people pretty hard, because upper level management rides us pretty hard. We don’t hit our quotas we’re looking for another job. And this place is so big it could hold over twenty football fields, so there’s a lot of ground to cover. We sometimes even ride bikes or three-wheelers to get to places faster and cover as much ground as possible. And with the new addition it’ll be half again bigger. And we have a climate control system, but it can still get pretty hot.”
“Well, obviously people want to work here.”
“The pay is good. Pickers start out at ten bucks an hour, plus health care and a 401(k) plan. You’re here five years, you’re making sixteen an hour. And we give out a decent amount of overtime and during big crunch periods like Christmas we have mandatory overtime, where they’ll work fifty-five to seventy hours a week. With the overtime, a lot of people here earn forty grand a year or more. These days that puts you in the middle class, especially if both husband and wife work here, and we have a lot of those. And hell, in this town that could even make you rich.”