he Contribution
The extraordinary contribution I saw made was when I was working at the Amazon fulfillment center in Akron, Ohio. Amazon in the past half a decade has started to call their fulfillment centers cost centers. This means they want to minimize the amount of cost associated with fulfilling the customer demands from Amazon.com. To do this, they set up KPI’s according to each area of the center in order to help operations management do so. I worked on the ship dock, and it was divided into two main areas of KPI’s: throughput and quality. Throughput is the amount of packages that our team would ship out on any given shift. In our case, we would typically range from about 200k-300k packages per shift. During busier seasons, such as Prime Week, Black Friday, and Christmas, this number would typically increase to about 600k-700k packages in a single shift. The other metric, quality, measured how efficiently and accurately the throughput was. This could include correct items being delivered, packages being delivered by the correct promise time that you see on your Amazon delivery, and trailer utilization rate. Quality was measured in a percentage.
When I first started, our quality team measured at about a 75%-80% each shift. This fell short of Amazon’s expectations of about 90% for each shift. Shortly after I started, our quality manager was fired, and it left me solely in charge of both the throughput and quality aspects of the operations. Simply put, this is way too much for a single person to manage. Was close with a process assistant on the shift that I greatly believed should have been promoted to a manager, but I did not have the authoritative power to promote her to the next level. With this being said, I put her in charge of our quality team. I would hold weekly meetings with the PA to discuss our quality goals, and the processes we were completing in order to increase our quality and achieve our goals. This PA not only helped our team achieve the Amazon goal of 90% quality per shift, we exceeded that goal and ended up with around 98% quality per shift by the time I left my position at Amazon. Absolutely extraordinary team effort to achieve something like this, and something we eventually got recognized by corporate Amazon as being a gold standard of how a ship dock at an Amazon cost center should opera
