According to foreign media reports, Amazon has started adding packaging robots to a few warehouses in recent year
According to foreign media reports, Amazon has started adding packaging robots to a few warehouses in recent years, and has considered installing such robots in dozens of other warehouses, each of which can eliminate at least 24 human jobs. This means that Amazon will cut more than 1,300 jobs in 55 logistics centers in the United States. The robots pack four to five times faster than humans, and Amazon is expected to recover costs in two years.
Automatic packing robots are four to five times faster than humans.
The new machine, called Carton Wrap, is provided by CMC Srl, Italy. According to the company, CMC Carton Wrap is an automatic carton packaging system that can meet the packaging needs of e-commerce and other companies using a large number of different sizes of boxes.
Sources said: the robot can handle 600 to 700 boxes per hour, which is four to five times faster than human packing speed. The data claimed by CMC is higher, with 15 boxes packed per minute, or 900 boxes per hour.
Recently, more and more reports show that Amazon has an urgent need to improve its production efficiency.
Wall Street heard earlier that Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky mentioned in a conference call on April 25 that the company plans to offer a one-day service to Prime members worldwide to replace the current two-day service. Although this may curb its future profits, Amazon still says it will step up spending and expects to invest $800 million in the second quarter to support the change. Because in the view of the e-commerce giant, providing faster delivery speed can encourage consumers to shop more on its website.
Before being distributed to consumers, all order goods will go through a series of processes in warehouse, such as tracking, packaging, distribution and so on. This means that in order to improve the efficiency of express delivery, Amazon is bound to seek higher packing speed. In addition to using more machines to replace manual labor, Amazon also requires logistics system employees to further improve their work efficiency.
Amazon's smart robots, or 1,300 people facing unemployment
The Verge quotes critics as saying that workers at Amazon Logistics Center face tough working conditions. Some people pack hundreds of boxes an hour and lose their jobs if they don't move quickly enough.
Documents recently obtained by the media show that Amazon uses a highly automated tracking system: Amazon's system tracks the productivity of every employee, and automatically generates any warnings or terminations on quality or productivity without the input of a supervisor, and even tracks employees'off-hours.
The documents also show that Amazon's layoffs are much more common than is known to the outside world. In a letter signed last year, a lawyer representing Amazon said that between August 2017 and September 2018, the company fired about 300 full-time employees at its distribution center in Baltimore because of their inefficiency and failure to meet production quotas. Baltimore Distribution Center currently has about 2500 full-time employees.
The Verge said that if Amazon's overall layoffs in North America were calculated at the same rate, that would mean thousands of people would lose their jobs each year because they failed to deliver parcels in time.
In addition, Amazon encourages employees to leave and start express companies. According to CNBC, on Monday, Amazon said it would provide up to $10,000 in financial support if employees wanted to leave the company to start a express startup. Amazon CEO Bezos talked about the Pay to Quit project in a letter to shareholders five years ago, which is a further extension of the project. In addition, the project is in line with Amazon's efforts to open up more express options.
Original title: Amazon introduced CMC Carton Wrap automatic carton packaging system, packaging speed is 4 to 5 times as fast as manual
(Source: Wall Street News)
