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Are You Selling Your Products Through Amazon? Here's How You Need to Package Them

Ironically, in an age of automation, human error provides human jobs

By Rain Noe - July 9, 2015

in Design Business | Packaging

Much has been made in the press of Amazon's Kiva robots, the small-but-mighty Roomba-sized machines that carry entire racks loaded up with products. Here's some cool footage of them in action at Amazon's latest eight-generation fulfillment center:

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While the Kiva units mean human workers no longer have to walk the aisles—instead the shelves come to them—the Kivas won't replace humans anytime soon at Amazon's fulfillment centers. A look inside the inventory receiving area, below, reveals why.

The product designers among you are well familiar with the design and manufacturing processes behind a product. But how many of you are familiar with the last mile before they get to an end user's house? Ever picture your slaved-over items being transferred in and out of different cardboard boxes and riding a series of conveyor belts? That process—and particularly how they are packaged for shipment to the fulfillment center—also requires careful design.

In this look at how Amazon has to deal with incoming shipments, we see why humans are still needed: To deal with the screw-ups made by other humans.

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Patrick McDonald

9 years ago

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Any man not correctly labelling his units spends a night in the box

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Noodle Time

9 years ago

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i know this is not a political forum, so please dont take my post as such.... But with the advent of automation, I have always found it amusing when people complain about minimum wage, or 'fair' wage.... it seems that mandating wage increases is actually more beneficial for technology and efficiency... in that, by raising the cost of labor, it makes these large capital investments (robotics) more financially beneficial. And with most technological things, price always goes down with time and volume. So the 'replacements' end up costing less.

i know there will always be a need for manual labor, but given the robotic trend, there are going to be fewer and fewer low skill jobs as the years go on.. .so people can either better themselves and get skills/education, or milk the welfare cow. (i hope for the first)

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- John T
  
  Noodle Time
  
  9 years ago
  
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  Noodle Time - Take your thought process a few steps further. You are correct that automation will continue to eliminate jobs. However, given that the cost of technology continues to decrease, you should assume this will happen regardless of demands for minimum wages. It is just a matter of how quickly it comes.
  
  Since we still have roughly the same number of people, but we have less jobs for them, I don't think it's wrong for them to ask that the jobs they can get pay a living wage.
  
  Furthermore, the "better yourself" argument may work for the individual, but it doesn't scale up. At a certain point, cost cutting and automation simply mean there aren't enough well paying jobs to go around. I certainly don't claim to have an answer for fixing that, but I don't think it's fair to say that if people simply "better themselves", this will fix the problem.
  
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  - Kivi Shapiro
    
    John T
    
    9 years ago
    
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    John T - Guaranteed Minimum Income does the trick.
    
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Juan Cano

9 years ago

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Wow. So impressive.

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