Amazon’s centers ramp up for season
Walking into Amazon’s new fulfillment center in Matteson, holiday decorations including red and green balloons form an archway, with a sign “Tis the season” hanging just below it.
The holiday shopping and shipping season is among the first big tests of the fulfillment center, one of three that Amazon opened in the south suburbs this year.
At the southeast corner of Harlem Avenue and Vollmer Road, the Matteson facility has enough floor space to contain more than 60 football fields, and joins newly christened fulfillment centers in Markham and University Park.
The Matteson center is opening in phases, with two floors and some other areas still under construction, according to Lamonte Heyward, general manager. It processed its first order Oct. 10.
On Cyber Monday, the center was expected to process 100,000 items, but will have the capacity to ship 1 million units in a 24-hour period once it’s at full capacity, Heyward said.
That level is expected to be reached sometime next summer, and employment at the center will grow along with it. There are about 1,800 people working there now, and that is expected to increase to 3,200, Heyward said.
As the holidays draw closer, the Matteson center’s capacity will ratchet up, he said.
“By Christmas we should be close to 200,000 shipments per day,” Heyward said.
In filling job openings at Matteson, Amazon had anticipated some hiring constraints but has been able to reach its employee targets, according to Arya Cohn, senior human resources manager at the Matteson site.
Sign-on bonuses of $3,000 were offered, and Amazon boosted the
base starting wage to $18 from the average starting pay of $16, she said.
Workers in Matteson are also filling orders with the aid of robotics.
“The uniqueness about this (fulfillment center) and Markham is the technology,” Heyward said.
Amazon in 2021 was scheduled to open 11 fulfillment centers around the country, including the two in the Southland, where people and robots work in tandem.
“They interact with each other,” Heyward said. “It makes the process more efficient.”
That is largely because workers do not have to walk through rows and racks of items comprising an order set to be shipped. Instead, they get their own version of Amazon delivery.
The low-slung devices roll up to an employee’s work station topped with a yellow
tower of merchandise tucked in small cubicles.
A computer screen displays a letter and number
that tells the employee filling a yellow tote bin which cubicle to select from, with a light that shines on the specific cubby hole to help direct the employee’s eyes.
To fulfill a particular order, a number of product pods came and went in front of one employee, who was directed to pull out merchandise including food storage containers, a gingerbread house and canister of coffee.
Once the order is filled, the employee gets another message telling him or her they’re done with one order and it’s time to fill a new tote.
Heyward said the facility now has 3,500 such robotic helpers, with that figure increasing to as many as 7,000 when the fulfillment center hits full capacity.
The Matteson site handles a variety of merchandise, each weighing 25 pounds or less, and from that location an order might go directly to a customer’s address or in one of several smaller delivery hubs Amazon operates, he said.
The Matteson facility is similar in design to the new Markham fulfillment center, on the south side of 159th Street between Interstate 294 and Dixie Highway.
The multilevel facilities each have footprints of about 800,000 square feet, but each contains more than 3 million square feet of floor space.
In University Park, Amazon also opened a 1.2 million-square-foot fulfillment center near Interstate 57 and University Parkway.