WESTBOROUGH — The site of one of only five locations like it in the country, the Amazon Fulfillment Center on Otis Street was firing on all cylinders Tuesday — Prime Day .
"This facility does about 35,000 packages per day, on average, but during Prime Day we're expecting to do about a 25% increase on that number," Andrew Schwarz, site lead at the Amazon Fulfillment Center at 64 Otis St., told a Daily News reporter who was visiting for the day.
Prime Day is a semi-annual sales blitz during which Amazon treats its Prime members to deals on several of its top brands. This summer's edition fell on Tuesday and Wednesday.
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An Amazon Prime membership costs $14.99 a month, or $139 annually. It includes various perks including free delivery options and streaming, shopping and reading benefits. Prime members can share their membership with other family members.
Amazon's Westborough fulfillment center opened in October. It provides same-day delivery throughout MetroWest and eastern Massachusetts.
Amazon has other facilities in Central Massachusetts. A warehouse on the site of the former Greendale Mall in Worcester is expected to be online by the end of the year. The 121,000-square-foot building has been dormant since construction wrapped up in late 2022.
Westborough fulfillment center designed for fast, efficient delivery
The fulfillment center, one of several buildings Amazon has in Westborough, is small by Amazon standards — about 200,000 square feet, or roughly the size of a WalMart Supercenter. Some of the online commerce giant's fulfillment centers cover more than 1 million square feet. The Westborough location, though, was designed for sleek efficiency, providing same-day delivery over a relatively short geographic distance.
"This building is super-unique. There are only five of these building types in the entire North American network," Schwarz said.
The Westborough site is designed to be one of the most technologically advanced spaces in Amazon's vast warehouse empire. The evolution and growth of robotic systems have led to what Schwarz said is efficient design to satisfy customer need.
"We have the latest design features, which only five sites in the entire network have," he said. "We are what's called a sub-same day facility, which is really focused on same-day delivery when people order our products. It's an expanding business line and we're growing pretty aggressively."
Robots are at the center of Amazon's delivery process
The robots, most of which are built by the Amazon Robotics factory in an adjacent building , take center stage and are used throughout the facility. The most notable contributors are what Amazon calls its robotic drives, roomba-like robots that carry lofty pillars of inventory ranging from bubble gum to headphones to air purifiers.
The system works with inventory arriving at the warehouse, where it is then sorted by employees into different cubbies that are on pillars being carried by the robots. Each piece of inventory is tagged by the robotic system, so that the system that dictates the entire warehouse knows where the product is located. The robot then carries the pillar of inventory onto the warehouse floor.
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When an item is ordered off Amazon.com, the robot carrying the pillar that contains the ordered item is programmed to move to the warehouse's packaging area, where an attendee picks the ordered item off the pillar and places it down a short chute, where another employee packages the item and sends it on its way down a conveyor belt.
The Westborough facility utilizes 200 of these robots and they roll around the center of the warehouse, carrying pillars of inventory as bees do with honeycomb. The system has largely replaced manual labor systems that have historically been used in warehouses.
"Traditional fulfillment, you would just have rows and rows — almost like a library — and you would take a handcart and just walk up and down, and you would have a hand-scanner, find the item and then place it in the queue," Schwarz said. "That item would then just sit on that cart until you finish doing the serpentine, in order for it to get packed out. Now, as soon as that item is picked (ordered) it goes right to being able to be packed."
Balancing labor between robots with human employees
Robots continue to play a major role as the package continues on its way to delivery. An automated scanner system places a sticker on each package, which indicates which delivery route it should be placed on determined by where it's being shipped. The package continues along an elaborate conveyor belt that seems to stretch around the entire warehouse, until stopping and being automatically scanned and slid off into one of dozens of basins, which are all sorted by geographic location. Basins are then emptied by employees and placed into vehicles for shipment.
The Westborough facility employs more than 300 workers. Schwarz said that while the robotic system plays a major role in the process, the company still focuses on human employees.
"This is still a people-facing business. The drives are cool and they do a lot of the heavy lifting, but it's all with the intention of not replacing our people — it's to make their job safer and make sure we can serve our customers in a more effective manner," Schwarz said.
This article originally appeared on MetroWest Daily News: Prime Day: Amazon Fulfillment Center in Westborough focuses on same-day delivery
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