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Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
The company for seven years.This design was inadequate for the new world in which Amazon was operating; one shaped by what Humair calls the “globalization-localization imperative.” Amazon’s expansion included an increasing number of international locations — at the time, the company had 175 fulfillment centers serving customers in 185 countries around the world.“Meeting the needs of our customer base meant that we needed to serve those customers in multiple geographies,” Humair said.As Amazon continued to expand internationally, the company also launched one-day and same day delivery windows in local regions for services like Amazon Prime and Amazon Prime Now.“We quickly realized that in addition to serving customers around the globe, we also had to pivot from functioning as a national network to a local one, where we could position inventory close to our customers,” Humair says. Left to right, Deepak Bhatia, vice president of Supply Chain Optimization Technologies at Amazon; Salal Humair, senior principal research scientist; Alp Muharremoglu, a senior principal scientist; Jeff Maurer, a vice president in SCOT; and Yan Xia, principal applied scientist, were among those instrumental in migrating Amazon to the multi-echelon system. In addition to the ‘globalization-localization imperative,’ the growing complexity of Amazon’s supply chain network further complicated matters. To meet the increased customer demand for a diverse variety of shipping speeds, Amazon’s fulfillment network was expanding to include an increasing number of building types and sizes: from fulfillment centers (for everyday products) and non-sortable fulfillment centers (for larger items), to smaller fulfillment centers catering to same-day orders, and distribution centers that supplied products to downstream fulfillment centers. The network was increasingly becoming layered, and fulfillment centers in one layer (or echelon) were acting as suppliers to other layers.“We had to reimagine every aspect of our system to account for this increasing number of echelons,” Humair
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