Amazon Research Paper

The Technology Behind the Web-Centric Retailer, Amazon
A decade ago, having an item ordered online and delivered the same day would've been absurd. With the advent of the Internet, this would become one of the many forms of what is now known as, e-commerce and it's becoming a major player in how we operate businesses today. Jeff Bezos realized this potential, and in 1994 he would create the online bookstore Amazon (Hall, 2017). It has since grown into the world's largest online retailer, home to millions of products. Over the years Amazon has developed the technology to sustain the best prices, and delivery times, while also consistently delivering the best customer experience in all of online retail, but the innovation doesn't end there.
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A decade later, Amazon made "one-hour delivery a reality in over 25 cities across America, Europe, and Japan" ("History"). Across the years Amazon had drastically improved its warehouses' efficiency in a plethora of ways. With warehouses storing thousands of items, Amazon needed a way to optimize the process in which they store and retrieve them. By randomly storing its products wherever space is available, Amazon is not only able to save valuable storage space but it also "allows them to store twice as many goods than they did five years prior." This process, commonly referred to as chaotic storage, uses computers and barcode scanners to trace out optimal routes to retrieve multiple orders at once. At first glance, it seems counterintuitive, but instead "this actually helps employees avoid mix-ups, i.g., grabbing the wrong size or color item, which would ruin an order," this becomes incredibly important when processing thousands of orders within an hour (Robinson, 2017). After acquiring Kiva Systems in 2012, Amazon has further improved its chaotic storage system. The Kiva robot is a yellow, square-shaped machine that can lift pallets of around 700 pounds. After deploying the bots, "cycle times have been cut from 60 to 75 minutes to roughly 15..., while inventory space grew 50%." With Kiva, Amazon has effectively lowered operating expenses while increasing warehouse efficiency (Kim, 2016). Considering how much Amazon is saving with Kiva, they are now able to spend more on improving other