Order Fulfillment Center
From Open Source Ecology
Basics
- An emerging model due to the rise of E-Commerce
- It takes the model of a Big-Box Store but removes the customer from the site, and replaces it with E-Commerce based odering of items, and Shipping (or Local Delivery )
- Thus the issue of Engineering the Space for Profit is Eliminated (or rather in most cases moved to the website design), allowing for Organizational Optimization and/or Warehouse Automation
- One can essentially imagine it as a giant Vending Machine
- Currently the main competitors in this market are:
- Amazon (Company) and walmart
- Amazon has the advantage of a "blank slate", while walmart has existing Big Box Stores and is sort of retrofitting them to be able to do this
- Amazon automates nearly all of the process short of "pickers" who are essentially human stand ins for the robots in development (and are often treated as such, plenty of horror stories on how they treat their workers...)
- Walmart is starting to have people who are employed to essentially "do the shopping" and then bring the order to a shipping station, or bring it to Curb Side Pickup
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