BLR8

My current hypothesis for generating new ideas is to put myself in new situations. Today, I used Amazon Tours to visit Amazon's Bangalore Fulfillment Center (FC) BLR8. Took me back to ITC days and the start of my career to be in a warehouse. Quite fun! It's a huge space (~0.4M sq ft) for a normal person like me. But tiny in the Amazon FC network because bear in mind the biggest Amazon FCs are 10x bigger. Two things stood out to me:

Digital twin: Amazon has created a digital twin that models every tiny part of their supply chain which it uses to run a massive constrained optimization problem. I am curious what the optimization function here is. Is it total cost to deliver? Or speed or some mix? Over what period - 1 day, 1 quarter, or 1 year? Are there parts of it that are local optimizations vs regional vs global?

Low automation: Amazon FC's in India are quite low automation. Yes, they are neat and organized (vs other warehouses I have seen), but there's so few machines. Why? Because (apparently) low labor costs break all cost-benefit analyses.

Sad life: Being a warehouse worker is quite a sad job. Essential but sad. You have no phone, no colleagues or teammates per se so you are lonely, and you basically follow the instructions given by a machine (go to X and do Y). But there is non-zero value to it, and we have an endless pool or labor which will accept that non-zero value, even if they know it's unfulfilling. I wish we get to a place where Amazon and others struggle to hire such workers because they have better options, but I know that is decades away (at current pace).