As an avid online shopper and student of the retail industry, I‘ve long been fascinated by Amazon‘s ability to consistently deliver orders with remarkable speed and precision. Customers like myself have come to expect that we can click "Buy Now" and have pretty much anything arrive at our doorstep within a day or two – but how exactly does Amazon pull off this logistical magic trick millions of times over, day after day?
It turns out one of the most critical steps in Amazon‘s fulfillment process is something the company calls "pack flow" – the point at which individual ordered items make their way into boxes bound for customers‘ homes. Having looked extensively into Amazon‘s operations, I‘ve come to appreciate that pack flow is something of an unsung hero in the company‘s success story. It may not be as flashy as tech-forward innovations like delivery drones or checkout-free stores, but the speed and accuracy with which Amazon can pack and ship orders is arguably just as important to the customer experience.
In this article, we‘ll take a deep dive into all things pack flow: what it entails, how it works, why it‘s so important, and what it‘s like for the thousands of workers who perform this crucial job every day. We‘ll also examine how technology and automation are transforming pack flow, and where it might be headed in the future. By the end, you‘ll hopefully come away with a newfound appreciation for the sophisticated dance of people and processes that hums away behind the scenes every time you place an Amazon order.
Unpacking the Pack Flow Process
At its essence, pack flow refers to the steps involved in getting ordered items securely boxed up and ready to ship out to customers. It‘s a fast-paced, continuous process that takes place in the sprawling fulfillment centers where Amazon houses its massive variety of products.
Here‘s a high-level overview of how it works:
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After a customer places an order, robots and/or human pickers locate and grab the purchased items from inventory shelves and bins spread throughout the warehouse. Multiple orders are picked simultaneously in batches.
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Picked items are sorted into yellow plastic totes, each containing items for a single order. These totes are placed onto conveyors that snake throughout the facility.
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The totes arrive at packing stations, each staffed by a human packer who empties the tote and scans each item to make sure it matches the order.
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Based on the item dimensions and quantity, the system automatically recommends a box size and the packer grabs the appropriate box from a nearby cart.
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The packer places the items into the box, adding air pillows or other dunnage as needed to prevent items from shifting around in transit.
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The packer closes and tapes the box, affixes a shipping label to the outside, and sends it down another conveyor where it will be routed to the appropriate delivery truck.
From there, the process repeats over and over, hundreds of times per hour, as new orders continually flow in. It‘s a tightly choreographed ballet of boxes, totes, and conveyors designed to get orders on trucks and on their way to customers as quickly as possible.
"After an order is placed, our fulfillment team gets to work immediately, often using robotic systems to locate items and bring them to packing stations," an Amazon spokesperson told me. "Packers then follow a highly efficient process to get orders boxed up securely and sent on their way, usually in a matter of minutes."
And the speed and scale of it all is staggering. Amazon has stated that during peak periods, packers are boxing up orders at a rate of one every three seconds. In 2021, Amazon shipped over 6.7 billion packages globally, or more than 250 per second on average. Those kinds of numbers simply wouldn‘t be achievable without a ruthlessly efficient pack flow system.
The Packer Life: Fast-Paced and Physically Demanding
So who exactly are the people tasked with executing Amazon‘s pack flow process? Thousands of workers at fulfillment centers around the world hold the job title of "packer," a role positioned as an accessible entry point to a career at Amazon.
Job postings for packer positions typically list a high school diploma or equivalent as the only educational requirement, though some previous warehouse experience is preferred. More important are physical capabilities like the ability to stand for long periods, lift up to 49 pounds, and perform repetitive motions.
Packers are also expected to be detail-oriented and able to "work with a sense of urgency," as the postings often put it. That‘s because packers are held to strict productivity standards, generally measured by the number of completed packages per hour – a metric that Amazon refers to as the "pack flow rate."
While the exact rate packers are expected to hit can vary based on factors like item size and time of year, a figure of 70-120 packages per hour is commonly cited by current and former employees. Performance against this benchmark is closely tracked, and consistently missing rate is likely to result in coaching and/or disciplinary action. Some packers have reported receiving automated texts from their managers prodding them to speed up when their rate dips.
"Your rate depends a lot on what items you‘re packing, but they generally want us to hit at least 80-90 per hour," said Maria R., a current Amazon packer I spoke with. "It can definitely be stressful trying to move fast enough, especially during peak times. But you get into a rhythm and just try to focus on being smooth and efficient with your motions."
Indeed, the pack flow process is designed to be as streamlined as possible, with an aim of eliminating any wasted seconds. Packers remain stationary at their stations as totes and boxes come to them, and a digital screen tells them exactly what boxes and dunnage to use for each order.
Some other physical realities of packer life include:
- Standing on hard concrete floors for 10-12 hours at a time
- Constant bending, lifting, and reaching motions to move items in and out of boxes
- Working in a noisy, fast-paced environment surrounded by heavy machinery
- Wearing bulky safety equipment like steel-toed shoes and bump caps
The work may be grueling at times, but many packers I‘ve spoken to say they appreciate the predictability and relative simplicity of the job. They clock in, keep their head down and hands moving for 10-12 hours, and clock out. Compared to some other roles like picking or stowing that require more walking and decision-making, packing can be seen as a "groove" that‘s fairly easy to settle into.
"You definitely feel it in your body after a long shift, but in some ways it‘s easier than other warehouse jobs I‘ve had," another Amazon packer told me. "With packing, the process is always the same and you‘re not having to run all over the place. You just find your rhythm and zone out a bit. But yeah, it is super repetitive and can get boring for sure."
Keeping Up With Amazon‘s Growth
As Amazon has exploded in size over the past decade, becoming the world‘s largest ecommerce company with over $450 billion in annual revenue, scaling up its pack flow operation has been a constant challenge. The company now operates over 175 fulfillment centers worldwide, comprising more than 150 million square feet of space.
To staff these sprawling facilities, Amazon now employs nearly 1 million full and part-time workers across its global fulfillment operations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company went on an unprecedented hiring spree, adding hundreds of thousands of workers practically overnight to keep up with a surge in orders from homebound consumers.
By all indications, Amazon has no intention of slowing down its torrid pace of expansion anytime soon. The company is plowing billions into building new warehouses, with plans to add at least 100 new facilities in 2022 alone. It‘s also experimenting with new delivery models like electric delivery vans and even autonomous vehicles to get orders to customers even faster and more efficiently.
All of this growth will undoubtedly place even more pressure on pack flow to keep up. After all, all those orders flowing through all those new facilities still need to be boxed up by somebody (or something). It‘s likely that in the years to come, we‘ll see Amazon continue to refine and optimize pack flow through a combination of process refinements, technological enhancements, and sheer staffing power.
The Future of Pack Flow
Indeed, technology is already transforming pack flow in significant ways as Amazon rolls out more and more automated solutions in its fulfillment centers. In many facilities now, robotic arms retrieve totes of items and place them in front of packers, speeding up the inbound flow of work. Sophisticated vision systems scan and verify the contents of boxes to catch any errors before they‘re sealed.
Looking further out, it‘s not hard to imagine a future in which the entire packing process is automated end-to-end, with nary a human hand involved. Amazon has long been candid about its ambitions to eventually staff its warehouses primarily with robots and greatly reduce its reliance on human labor.
But for now, humans are still very much essential to pack flow. Robots may be able to move items from A to B faster and more precisely than humans can, but they still struggle with tasks that require fine motor skills, manual dexterity, and contextual decision-making. Packing irregularly-shaped items snugly and safely into a box is harder than it seems.
"There‘s a lot of intuition and judgment involved in packing that would be really hard to automate, at least with current technology," said Sarah W., a former Amazon packer turned robotics engineer. "Like, knowing how much dunnage to put in so items don‘t get damaged, or noticing when a product looks wrong or damaged. Those are things humans are still way better at than robots."
Amazon itself has acknowledged this, with Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky stating in a 2021 earnings call that the company will continue hiring human workers even as it ramps up automation "because of all the growth that we see in the business. We will need to add employees. So I don‘t look at it as one substituting the other."
Still, the ratio of humans to robots will likely continue shifting more towards the latter in the years to come. A glimpse of this future can be seen in Amazon‘s eighth-generation fulfillment centers, which feature high levels of automation for everything from stowing to picking to sorting. Humans are still very much present in these futuristic facilities, but their roles are evolving to be more about monitoring, troubleshooting, and maintaining the automated systems that do much of the physical work.
As for what this means for pack flow specifically, it‘s likely that we‘ll see more and more aspects of the process automated over time. Some areas ripe for optimization through technology include:
- More intelligent software to automatically determine optimal box sizes and packing configurations for each order, reducing waste and damage
- Advanced vision systems and sensors to automatically verify order contents and catch errors before boxes are sealed
- Robotic arms or even fully automated packing stations that can erect, fill, seal, and label boxes with minimal human intervention
- Machine learning algorithms that can dynamically adjust pack flow rates and staffing based on real-time order volume and item mix
Of course, any technological advancements will have to be weighed against the significant up-front costs of automation, as well as the potential impact on Amazon‘s sizable human workforce. The company has long touted its job creation record as a point of pride and political capital, so any moves that could be seen as replacing human workers will have to be handled delicately.
For the foreseeable future, then, pack flow is likely to remain a human-centric operation, albeit one augmented by increasingly sophisticated technology. The humble packer, standing at their station and hustling to hit their hourly rate, will still be an essential cog in Amazon‘s ecommerce machine.
The Bottom Line
At the end of the day, pack flow may not be the most glamorous or high-tech part of Amazon‘s operations, but it is absolutely essential to the company‘s core mission of being "Earth‘s most customer-centric company." No amount of whiz-bang innovation matters if orders don‘t end up on customers‘ doorsteps accurately and on-time.
In that sense, the packer role is perhaps the most important in all of Amazon‘s vast fulfillment apparatus. These workers are the last line of defense against errors, damage, and delays, and the speed and precision with which they work has an outsized impact on customer satisfaction.
Next time you receive an Amazon package, take a moment to reflect on the intricate ballet of people and processes that made it possible. Somewhere along the way, human hands and eyes carefully packed your order into a box, affixed a label, and sent it on its way to you. That may seem a small thing, but multiplied by millions of orders per day, it adds up to something remarkable. Such is the power and importance of a well-oiled pack flow.
