Amazon

Recently Amazon has put its Austrian distribution center into operation and the first Amazon trucks are already underway in Vienna.

When you ordered a product on Amazon and that box with the smile arrived, didn't you wonder how it got to you so fast, where it came from and how much it costs Amazon to deliver it to you? Tobias Hildebrand, Operations Manager at Amazon gave interesting insights.

A few months ago Amazon has put its distribution center in Großebersdorf (Lower Austria) into operation. There the online giant is working with seven independent delivery service partners in order to enable quick and reliable parcel delivery in the Vienna metropolitan area. The Trade Delegates had the opportunity to take a look into the Amazon Logistics (AMZL) world and to learn more about the complex system behind.

Großebersdorf is Amazon's fist presence in Austria, beside its development center in Graz, where safety features for Amazon Prime Air are developed. Amazon's ambitious Prime Air program aims to use delivery drones to deliver Amazon orders within 30 minutes or less. Amazon has been testing its Prime Air delivery drones for years now, but a few days ago it made its first public demo of the system in the US.

Experienced in computer vision - the discipline of teaching machines how to see - the researchers in Graz develop "sense and avoid" technologies for those small drones.

When Amazon.com launched in 1995, it was with the mission "to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices." This goal continues today, but there are more than 300 million customers worldwide now, and have grown to include millions of Consumers, Sellers, Content Creators, and Developers & Enterprises. Each of these groups has different needs, and we always work to meet those needs, innovating new solutions to make things easier, faster, better, and more cost-effective, as Mr. Hildebrand explained.

The delivery station Großebersdorf with about 9.800 m² and around 150 employees (beside the local partners) operates from Sunday 0:00 am to Saturday 1:00 pm in 3 Shifts, organizing the shipment of currently thousand Packages with around 250 Vehicles in 6 Waves.

AMZL is Amazon's own delivery service for the "last mile", operating with around 80 Delivery Stations in Europe. For delivery to customers AMZL works together with local delivery service partners. The distribution takes place with the help of Amazon's own route planning and route optimization.

Route optimization is the process of determining the most cost-efficient solution route for many organizations who use a transportation for a part of this business model. The always-on, cloud-based software solutions can increase productivity by improving the timing and routing of shipments with greater efficiency, because it consistently recalibrates in response to infrastructure changes and road conditions.