Prime Day is one of the most exciting days of the year – and for Amazon’s more than 60 Operations facilities across Canada, the focus is on fulfilling high volumes of customer orders while having fun and making history.
“We spend the entire year preparing for Prime Day, ensuring that we have millions of items in inventory and that our logistics network is prepared to manage record volumes,” said Darkhan Urmurzin, a senior operations manager at Amazon’s 440,000 square foot YXX2 robotics fulfilment centre in Richmond, BC. “However, our focus is also on ensuring that our employees know how much we appreciate them - from cheering them on when they walk through the doors to staying in constant communication and supporting them throughout the day.”
YXX2 is one of 21 Amazon fulfilment centres across Canada. At the site, employees work alongside the small but mighty Amazon Hercules robots, which help improve safety and efficiency by retrieving shelves of products and delivering them to ergonomic workstations. Hercules robots help reduce walk time for employees while giving them a (robotic) helping hand by sliding under the appropriate shelf, lifting it off the ground, and driving to an employee, who picks the item and sends it off for packing.
During Prime Day, Hercules robots shift in to high gear, helping YXX2 fulfill hundreds of thousands of customer orders. After employees pick the items in a customer order, they are sent to a packing station where – for the first time – paper filler is used to protect items, instead of plastic air pillows.
Amazon has replaced 95% of the plastic air pillows from delivery packaging in North America with paper filler - another step in our path to avoid and reduce packaging, and part of our multi-year effort to remove plastic delivery packaging from North America fulfilment centres. For Prime Day this year, nearly all of our customer deliveries will not contain plastic air pillows.
At the YYZ3 fulfilment centre in Brampton, Ontario, the team got in to the Prime Day spirit one day early with a special 10th anniversary celebrationfeaturing the Hon. Charmaine A. Williams, MPP for Brampton Centre and Minister of Women's Social and Economic Opportunity; Patrick Brown, the Mayor of Brampton; Amazon Canada Country Manager Eva Lorenz; and Jaipaul Massey-Singh, CEO of the Brampton Board of Trade. The event also recognized employees celebrating their own 10-year anniversary at Amazon (also known as an Ama-versary).
Over at YGK1 in Belleville, the team celebrated the site’s first Prime Day. YGK1 is one of two AMXL fulfilment centres in Canada, where employees pick, pack, and ship customer orders for extra-large products, such as furniture, mattresses and exercise equipment. The building was full of excitement as customers took advantage of Prime Day deals to invest in big-ticket purchases.
“It’s an honour to lead a site through its first Prime Day,” said Amandeep Chouhan, YGK1 site leader. “A huge amount of planning is required, but it’s so worth it to see the excitement on the floor and for us to know that we are helping customers get great deals on the items they need and love.”
To learn more about Amazon Prime Day, click here.
