Robots speed up shipping at Amazon fulfillment center in Pflugerville
PFLUGERVILLE (KXAN) — At one point or another, you’ve probably arrived home to an Amazon package sitting on your doorstep.
Maybe you've wondered about where it came from and how it got there.
Throughout Central Texas, almost all of these items are shipped from the Amazon fulfillment center in Pflugerville.
It’s a massive 3.7 million-square-foot facility, where thousands of employees pick, pack and ship items in a matter of hours.
On average, 500,000 items are shipped out each and every day.
Amazon senior operations manager Robert Morua said their advantage with shipping speed can be credited to robots.
“Definitely lots of things going on, lots of interaction between humans and robots at the site,” he described. “It’s enabling them to do their job more efficiently.”
The latest generation of warehouse robots roll out large and heavy carts of packages.
Previously, these items would take a few Amazon associates to manually push throughout areas of the fulfillment center.
Amazon senior operations manager Carole Falugi said there are around 35 million items inside the Pflugerville facility.
So, the robots offer a big boost of efficiency.
“If you ever ordered more than one thing off Amazon and those items exist at two different sites, our robots will bring those two units together at a specific site,” Falugi said. “Where they're shipped to you in one box.”
The Amazon fulfillment center in Pflugerville currently employs more than 3,000 workers.
“As soon as you click 'buy' on your computer or cell phone, we will pick that unit, pack that unit and ship that unit out of this facility almost immediately,” Morua said.
The senior operations manager also added that his team is getting geared up for a sales surge ahead of Fourth of July weekend.
This will be followed by one of the busiest months of the year in August, when millions of items are ordered online for back-to-school preparation.