The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
How delivery giant is getting ready for its busiest period
Have you ever wondered what happens between ordering an item on Amazon and it arriving at your door?
We took a behind-thescenes look at the massive fulfilment centre in Dunfermline as the workforce of more than 2,000 staff prepares for Black Friday.
Inside the Fife base, staff are hard at work negotiating the endless rows of shelves filling the cast site.
From the moment any one of 250 million items arrives at the centre, they are stored on huge racks.
When an order comes in, the product is picked by one of the team and sent to packers, who collate the orders.
The technology is so sophisticated that if you make two Amazon orders at different points in a day, they can arrive together to cut down on packaging.
Technology again plays its part, helping staff select the right box for any order.
Once the package has been picked and packed, it is sent down one of 20 giant yellow spiral tubes to be shipped.
Getting parcels off the shelves in the fulfilment centre into packaging and on to the 190 delivery lorries that leave the site on a busy day requires a huge amount of manual labour.
Every day between now and Christmas, tens of thousands of items will pass through Dunfermline.
Amazon has a full-time workforce of 1,200 on the site, with an additional 1,000 part-time employees over the festive period.
Jamie Strain is general manager at the Dunfermline site, which first opened its doors just over a decade ago.
He said: “We’ll be shipping hundreds of thousands of items over the next few weeks.
“Customers can take advantage of the great deals.
“It’s a really busy time of the year. Our volumes overall have been comparable to last year.”
Strict Covid-19 protocols are still in place on site, and Amazon still offers staff a PCR test, with results returned from its purposebuilt testing lab in Manchester within 24 hours.
Mr Strain said the business had learned to adapt over the course of the pandemic.
“We learned a lot last year, and we have the same protocols in place on site.
“Our operation has adapted very well.
“We’ve been able to fulfil orders to our customers right across the UK while deploying those Covid measures.”
Businesses across the country have felt the impact of Brexit this year, with supply chain issues and problems recruiting.
Mr Strain said Amazon had escaped those problems.
“It has had very little impact,” he said.
“We are very much focused on shipping items across the UK from this building.”