Amazon It opened this week in Onda (Castellón). logistics mega warehouse Valencian Community. The platform has the capacity to deploy four million products in which stores extension similar to seven football fields and it works at full capacity 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
this the firm assures it will have “1,000 workers” in the years to come started with 350 –most store clerks–. The company is growing in Spain with the same model that made it a distribution giant in the United States. three types of centers: warehouses first mile (Large distribution centers like Onda, which send goods to intermediate distribution platforms), logistics stations (intermediate platforms located in the metropolitan area of large cities) and their warehouses last thousand (from where they ship the products to the customer’s home).
Onda’s platform is younot one of eight first-mile warehouses owned by the company He specializes in Spain and –like two others near Madrid–. large packages (more than half a meter). A 90% of the products from Onda are distributed all over Spain in one day. and the remaining 10% is for the rest of the continent.
american concept
platform, a very american concept with lots of security measures reminiscent of advertisements for accessing the airspace of an airport and encouraging covert reporting of “any violation of the code of conduct or immoral or unethical behavior”.
First day of recruiting corridor of clapping friends it’s like they’re an iPhone receiver at the premiere of a new model.
this platform name is VLC1 (referring to the fact that Valencia airport is closest to daily international flights) and is themed in a modern version with a shield inspired by Jaume I’s helmet. The facility is divided into three parts: product entry, storage and exit. this Miguel Gómez, Amazon’s head of shipping operations at OndaIt turns out that products are stored without any predetermined criteria because customers’ purchasing patterns are ultimately “random”.
this items are labeled with a barcode after they are loaded on board and laid on shelves with five heights. Once stored, they appear on the company’s website and customers can place orders. “We have products that are stored for three days or three weeks, depending on the reference,” explains Gómez.
Unlike other Amazon mega stores in Spain, Not fully robotized in Onda. Most modern platforms of the company have robots to transport goods, but this system cannot be applied in Castellón due to the type of packages, because it is too irregular due to its size.
from the warehouse is distributed from beach umbrellas to fryers, but is not used for shipping small items such as CDs or cell phones. This forces more than 80% of its workforce to consist of warehouse workers moving up and down with a laser reader to find products (the company assures that the margin of loss per million packages is “minimum” if not tangible). The platform has robots to facilitate the packaging of products.
As soon as the customer selects a product, the product leaves the storage area and is labeled with a new barcode this guarantees the anonymity of the recipient. The product starts to travel on a belt and is separated according to its destination thanks to camera recognition. Although it started with a workload of between 20% and 25%, the center has the capacity to deliver 80,000 units per day. this staff consists of professionals from various industries such as engineers, operations managers, financial analysts, human resources specialists and warehouse clerks.
choosed
One of the keys for Onda to choose Amazon’s third megapack hub in Spain is, Proximity to the port of Valenciais the entry of a significant part of the goods. As a counterpoint, the firm emphasizes that it facilitates sales to 1,500 Valencian SMEs.
Amazon begins to expand in the Community With the opening of a logistics station in Paterna in 2017, with distribution warehouses. Since then, the company has opened two logistics stations in Alicante and Picassen, as well as a last-mile distribution center (Amazon Fresh) for fresh produce in the capital city of Túria.
Opening of the Wave platform It comes at a time when Amazon is putting the brakes on its distribution in Spain.. The firm paralyzed projects planned in Reus (Tarragona), Celrà (Girona), Oiartzun (Vitoria) and Seville, with a total area of approximately 150,000 m2. It was the largest in Reus and was to be built on an area of 80,000 square meters, including the garage. Those located in Oiartzun and the province of Seville are designed to cover a total of 60,000 square meters, with the smallest in Celrà about 12,000 meters.
this digital giant paralyzed 12 platforms in the USA before the decline of electronic commerce in the first quarter. The company refrains from disclosing its investment in Onda. According to FDI Markets data, the American multinational has allocated more than 227 million euros to logistics infrastructure in the Community in 2020 (the year the Castellón project was activated). In the same year, the logistics station in Alicante was also under construction.