Agility Trumps Chaos at Amazon during the Holidays
After taking a dizzying tour of one of Amazon’s sprawling fulfillment centers, it’s difficult to imagine how the company manages to not collapse under the sheer weight and size of their daily challenge, especially during the holiday season.
With more than eighty warehouses—some more than a million square feet in size—being organized seems like a relentlessly challenging task. Amazon stops short of actually calling themselves organized, opting instead to refer to their system as “chaotic storage.”
After learning more about just how the company manages to not just stay afloat but to regularly increase profits and maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, I believe that “agile storage” is a more fitting title.
Agile’s very first principle—“to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery”—is at the very core of what Amazon’s shipping operation aims for and reaches on a daily basis.
Along those same agile lines, corporate vice president Craig Berman notes that the company is one of “constant improvement.” There is always room for improvement, and the company is always looking to find those areas where changes, welcome changes, can be made.
ABC News notes that “you won’t find any robots inside Amazon’s fulfillment centers"—stressing the company’s belief in the power of people over machines.
For generations, many companies have looked to machines and automation as the way to achieve faster results, while eliminating human error. But Amazon and agile go against this way of thinking in a major way:
Although it is possible to operate a chaotic storage system automatically, it is not always the best alternative. Amazon, for instance, still needs quite a lot of manpower, because a simulation of the storage processes showed that hiring warehouse staff was more economical than automation…Chaotic warehouses are much more flexible than conventional ones and can respond to changes in the product range much easier.
This agility, this willingness to adapt and adopt for the common goal of increased customer satisfaction, is what makes Amazon so good at what they do—delivering reliable and timely shipments of exactly what their customers desire.
“Welcoming changing requirements” “maximizing the amount of work not done”—nearly every core principle of the Agile Manifesto is found in the daily lives and goals of Amazon. From the corporate office to the 65,000 people working in fulfillment centers wowrldwide, the result is beautifully agile—and hardly chaotic at all.
Let me know in the comments below what lessons we can learn from Amazon about agile software development?
