An interview with Neil Travis, Amazon's Regional Director, and a behind the scenes look around Amazon's new huge fulfilment centre in Minworth, near Sutton Coldfield as it gears up for the Christmas season.
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00:00 [Music]
00:10 Thanks for coming back, it's fantastic.
00:12 And look, we're really pleased with the way the launch has gone.
00:15 And it's actually allowed us to hire more people, it's gone that well.
00:19 So, we originally thought we'd be around the 1,400 to 1,600 people within the building,
00:25 and we're just over 2,000 now.
00:27 So, it's been a really great opportunity for us to bring more people,
00:30 hire more people locally and offer more jobs.
00:33 And of course, the difference between this particular warehouse
00:37 and maybe a normal warehouse that people may have seen or have in their mind is
00:42 this is a very highly sophisticated advanced robotics warehouse
00:48 with all of the latest generation technology that we've got.
00:51 So, we spent over 500 million building this particular facility.
00:56 We've got over 12 kilometers of powered conveyance, and we've got thousands of robots.
01:03 And again, that's allowed us to create very highly skilled roles,
01:07 looking after the robots, looking after all the technology and all the equipment
01:11 that a lot of people don't really associate with normal warehouse environments.
01:15 But it's been really fantastic.
01:17 But the other thing again is, if you're used to a traditional warehouse environment,
01:24 one of my buildings, this is half the size,
01:28 but it allows us to store 50% more products within the same footprint.
01:36 So, we can basically, this is about half the size of one of my legacy buildings,
01:40 traditional buildings, and employing over twice the amount of people,
01:45 because obviously we're able to get that much more efficiency through these buildings.
01:49 They're tremendous.
01:51 And I mentioned earlier that if you'd have placed an order when you'd have parked up in the car park,
01:57 it would have probably been, I've left this building on its way to being delivered to your house by the time you leave.
02:02 So, we're typically going to be in a position to be shipping everything from this building
02:07 within two hours of you placing an order.
02:10 And that's for, you know, when you consider we're doing millions of orders a week
02:14 within this particular building alone, that's quite a feat.
02:17 And the technology allows us to do that.
02:20 And we can really only do it with that level of technology and sophistication
02:25 that we've invested in this particular building here.
02:28 (chime)
02:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]