Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Amazon site at LR port huge, bustling
4 floors of fulfillment center in operation employing over 2,000 people
It is hard to fathom just how cavernous the first Amazon.com fulfillment center in Arkansas is, regardless of the point from which it is viewed.
One of its five floors remains unfinished, yet the 3.6 million-square-foot facility at the Port of Little Rock already employs more than 2,000 people, according to its first general manager, Arkansas native Lorie White.
“We will continue to hire throughout the holiday season at this facility,” she said.
The fulfillment center is where Amazon accepts and stores products that its customers order online and where Amazon prepares each customer’s package for delivery. The packages are then sent to a delivery center.
The center at the port is one of 110 in the United States and one of the three most modern fulfillment centers Amazon operates. It is served by a delivery center on Interstate 30. A second, slightly less-huge fulfillment center that handles bulky products is served by a delivery center in Maumelle.
The port fulfillment center accepted its first package on Aug. 15, but it didn’t begin hitting on all available cylinders until this month, White said.
The view of the facility from records at the Pulaski County assessor’s office is the most impressive of any real estate in Pulaski County.
That’s because there is no more valuable real estate in the county, according to Joe Thompson, the office’s chief administrator.
“Nothing else is even close,” he said.
The assessed value of the property — $111.7 million — is almost twice as much as two of the next- most-valuable real- estate properties on the county’s books. Those are Park Plaza mall and The Outlets of Little Rock, both of
which are valued around $60 million for now.
Several factors go into assessing the value of the real estate, which includes the land, as well as any improvements to it, Thompson said.
Again, it begins with its sheer size.
“It is so much bigger than anything else out there,” he said. “Obviously, it’s the newest property. And it’s a stateof-the-art warehouse.”
The building’s value doesn’t include business personal property, such as furniture, fixtures, equipment and inventory. An inventory of its contents isn’t due until May 31, Thompson said.
Given all its robotics and other advanced equipment to accept, package and distribute items to deliver primarily to Arkansas customers, it could well rival the value of the equipment at the L’Oreal Maybelline cosmetics plant in North Little Rock.
The cosmetics plant has the most valuable business personal property on the county’s books, a total of $81 million, Thompson said.
The plant itself is valued at $18.1 million.
White was once an employee at the L’Oreal Maybelline facility, where she worked her way up to vice president for manufacturing operations.
She is a graduate of the Missouri University of Science and Technology with a degree in engineering/industrial management. The North Little Rock native attended the school on a basketball scholarship she earned while playing for Mount St. Mary Academy in Little Rock.
White is a rare leader among the managers of Amazon’s 110 and counting fulfillment centers in the United States, having come from the outside without previous experience at Amazon. The company’s general managers usually are promoted from within the company, working their way up the management ladder, according to Daniel Martin, a regional spokesman for the company.
What was supposed to be an hourlong tour of the fulfillment center led by White in late October ended up lasting 90 minutes. That 90 minutes covered parts of three levels — the first and second floors, as well as the mezzanine — and allowed tour participants to work up a sweat.
Another testament to its size is how much managers and many employees walk. They walk a lot. White said she walks so much — 8 miles a day — that she no longer needs to go to the gym.
Carol Smith, who goes by Renee, is 62 and amazed at how her health improved in the few months she has worked at the facility.
“I’ve lost 15 pounds, and I’ve lowered my blood pressure,” the former legal assistant said. “I love it.”
She also is among the employees who said they applied to Amazon for the benefits. Smith, who has 90 hours of college credit, said she plans to take online classes starting in January to finish her degree. Amazon recently announced that it would provide full tuition to Smith and 750,000 other front-line employees.
The employees made available on the tour — the two most senior executives under White, Greg Price and David Crawley — were generally upbeat and motivated. Price, a retired Air Force non-commissioned officer, came from outside the company. Crawley, from Chicago, is moving up the company ladder. He most recently worked for Amazon in Connecticut.
Crawley is the senior leader over the inbound operations while Price is the CAP senior leader. CAP is an acronym for Count Amnesty and Pick.
Smith started as a “picker” and now trains other pickers or helps improve their picking rate. Pickers put together orders for customers in one of the 1,000 yellow bins that flow through the massive conveyor system that snakes through the building.
Typically, a picker stands at a station, where an electronic reader scans information on the yellow box. That information is transmitted inside an enclosed area that takes up much of the second, third, fourth and, when completed, fifth floors.
The enclosed area on each floor is filled with hundreds of robotic wheeled platforms stacked with large shelving units called pods. They can be loaded with as much as 2 tons of products.
Once the information is processed from the information on the yellow bin, the robots carrying merchandise needed to fulfill a particular order move to a picker who picks out the products and puts them in the bin. That robot will move itself out of the way to make way for another one if multiple products are in the order.
There are also sorters who help unload the trucks and sort the merchandise. Stowers load the products onto the pods.
Other employees act as counters, taking constant inventory of the products so online customers can see exactly how many items are available.
Still others work on an amnesty team, a role that requires them to enter the enclosed stowed area to look after a broken down robot or pick up merchandise that might have fallen from a pod. The amnesty team member is electronically tracked inside the stowed area to avoid being hit by a pod.
The work continues almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“We have a two-hour window in which we do some preventative maintenance on several of the days,” White said.
White celebrates her anniversary with the company this month. Even before she knew she would work for Amazon, White said that given her background, every time she saw an Amazon package at her front door, she knew intuitively the challenge of getting it there.
The experience managing a facility from the ground up in virtually her hometown has been gratifying, White said.
“It’s been a lot of excitement to be able to come to Amazon,” she said. “For me, to be from North Little Rock, Arkansas, knowing that such a great company as Amazon is coming to the city and for me to have the ability to launch a building and make state history … honestly, it’s been a ton of fun.”