RFID Everywhere
Amazon’s fulfillment system is probably one of the most layered, convoluted, and complicated computer systems ever conceived. Aside from technical complexity, the systems are owned by a sprawling network of organizations. Sometimes even the mere thought of thinking big seems too much to ask.
We usually start with problems and figure out ways to solve them for the user’s benefit. In Worldwide Ops, a project that preceded my time looked at how capacitive RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags could be cheaply and easily applied to bins to eliminate the need for a human to scan a barcode. That experiment had promising results–they built a complex working prototype over the course of months and they found that eliminating the scan had the potential to make pickers not only faster, but more accurate and ergonomically healthy.
So we thought what if RFID was everywhere?
The chart above shows a comparison between a wholly-RFID enabled process (bottom) vs a traditional one (top). Not only can you see how visibly less dense the steps are, but also how many times you eliminate a “pick up, put down” cycle. But it’s hardly an engaging way to show a vision.
Sometimes ya gotta take the tech out of the tech
A working prototype is a very compelling thing, but would take a year to build one for the process path above. What if somehow we could just skip all the implementation details, pretend we can make whatever scientific breakthrough we need, overcome any logistical or organizational obstacle, and just envision the end state.
That’s exactly what we did, and we did it with stickers.
What we needed was an envisionment–a durable, self-contained asset that can be put in front of someone and shown. Everything would be 100% fake, including the fake RFID stickers we’d be “scanning” in our video. We decided to make a video that showed what a scan-less fulfillment center could look like. Starting with the flowchart, I roughed out some storyboards (which incidentally look like a drunk toddler’s work), wrote a shot list, roped in a couple of my teammates, and we hit our local Fulfillment Center to make the first movie any of us had ever made.
Watch the final envisionment
Say it with pictures
We presented the envisionment video at an annual conference of all the Amazon Operations directors worldwide–over 300 of the biggest big wigs from every country Amazon operates in. Someone told me every hour of the conference costs over $100k–I’m not sure he was serious, but I’d believe it. We showed it during a conference talk and also had it running on loop on the show floor.
RFID can’t actually do all the things we show it doing, but that’s not the point. We picked a plausible technology, and really showed what touchless processes could look like. Some of these things are actually starting to come to fruition, too. A coworker told me that wireless automatic palette scanning was put into production 2 years later, as a direct result of this video, and the optical-based IR ink system seen in Amazon Go stores is an offshoot of that project.