TAMPA, Fla. – If you’ve placed an order during Amazon Prime Day, there’s a chance it could be processed at the fulfillment center in Tampa Bay.
The TPA4 Amazon fulfillment center is one of the busiest of its type in the country.
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By the numbers:
On a regular day, the facility in Tampa Bay processes about 200,000 packages. During Amazon Prime Day, the facility says it processes about 300,000 packages each day.
“When you click buy, there is such a complex mechanism within our system that delivers that product to you,” Chase Brammer, a senior mechatronics tech at the TPA4 facility, said.
Dig deeper:
The facility combines hands-on team members with robot and AI technology to process items from the moment they’re ordered. After the order is placed, workers in the facility will begin processing the items.
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“That’ll take a robot that’ll take a mobile shelf, essentially, to the worker,” Brammer said. “Our older-style buildings use to be giant rows of, almost like a library, how you would pick a book.”
With the help of technology, those inventory shelves now come straight to the workers, who grab the items and send them on their way through the processing machines.
“It then goes down through a series of conveyance to some different process paths, where that product ends up into a package, gets a shipping label,” Jon Templeton, the maintenance manager at the TPA4 facility, said.
Items are packaged differently, based on their contents or the size of an order.
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What they’re saying:
Team members say technology has helped speed up and streamline the process from start to finish.
“A lot of it really does help out with our day-to-day tasks,” Brammer said. “Repetitive tasks that may have been grueling or issues in the past, we’re actually taking the load of the workers while enabling them to get you your product at a quicker rate.”
During Amazon Prime Day, the center plans ahead to make sure its inventory is stocked with popular, big-ticket items.
“If we know something’s going to sell, we generally have that in a fast-track path to get it to you as soon as possible,” Brammer said.
Timeline:
Once the items from an order are picked out and processed, they go down to packaging. Robot technology packages each item and sends it to be sorted.
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“The technology is great,” Templeton said. “It’s really one of our best friends.”
Team members say other robot technology reads the shipping labels and sorts the items, and they’re then delivered to corresponding chutes based on where the packages are headed.
The packages will wait on the dock to be picked up by trucks and taken to another distribution center, before being delivered to your doorstep.
“To watch the journey of the package and watch the progression of the technology that really has to kind of touch the package and get it out the door, is truly breathtaking, Templeton said.
The Source: The information in this story was gathered by FOX 13’s Kylie Jones.
