BRAMPTON

It’s called a fulfillment centre, built to ship thousands of Amazon orders a day. But what it is really fulfilling is the dream of the future.

The robot carrying bins of product stands in line and zips forward, waiting for the Amazon associate to dig through its inventory and cherry pick items that people have ordered online.

Behind it, are several others of the same 350 lb. model – capable of lifting 700 lbs. of stuff – all waiting for their turns.

The scene resembles something out of Wall-E, with these nine-foot automated “Amazon Robotics Drive Units” scanning QR codes to detect their path and moving in different directions within a grid. Using built-in sensor technology, the robots don’t crash into each other, even though they’re moving at 8 km/h.

The working relationship between man and machine is part of a typical day in Brampton’s Amazon Fulfillment Centre, the company’s first Canadian automated facility that opened last summer, which places speedy delivery as its top priority by using robotics technology.

“At a traditional fulfillment centre, a picker would be walking to find that item in almost a library-type setting,” said Ashley Robinson, communication manager for Amazon operations. “Here, in a robotics fulfillment centre, the item is coming to her. The technology is very smart.”

The advent and implementation of automation, has allowed a quicker turnaround in supply and shipping. Tens of thousands of items leave this fulfillment centre each day – and for those who use Prime delivery in the GTA, they get their packages at their door mere hours later.

According to researcher eMarketer and Bloomberg, Canadians spent $26.6 billion online shopping in 2016. Paul Briggs, eMarketer’s Canadian analyst tweeted in late May Amazon sites were killing its competition with 11.27 million unique visitors in February, beating out eBay at 9.84 million and Walmart at 3.57 million.

Canada is obviously on the company’s expansion radar. Amazon has opened a fulfillment center every year in Canada since 2011, starting with Mississauga, then growing into a second Brampton location and Milton, plus two warehouses in British Columbia.

Amazon doesn’t see automation as taking away jobs, either. On the contrary.

“I don’t have a crystal ball in 20 years from now, but what I can say is this building has been able to grow its own workforce because of the use of robotics,” said Robinson. “We’ve certainly seen that in the States,” citing Amazon’s New Jersey automated centre has the largest workforce with more than 3,500 full-time employees.

The automated Brampton centre near Winston Churchill Blvd. and Steeles Ave. W. has 700 full-time employees, with an additional 200 hired last month, working in this 855,000 square feet, four-storey building. Under the same roof, there are a couple hundred of the robots, developed by Boston-based Kiva Systems.

In the GTA, Amazon has over two-million square feet of operations footprint and worldwide, 25 robotic buildings.

The warehouse shifts split into two 20 hour shifts, with a two-hour break in between, seven days a week.

While it’s difficult to pinpoint Amazon’s overall impact on shipping compared to the standard delivery model, it’s about giving people the option of speedier delivery – starting at a price of $7.99 per package.

“I don’t know the standard delivery model,” she said. “I can say when we’re talking here and we’re looking at Prime, that’s what enables that faster delivery. It’s about having more inventory in the building and having fulfillment centres closer to the customers. We’re close to those metropolitan areas because we know that’s where a lot of our customers are located.”

Ground delivery isn’t the only delivery method, either. Right now, Amazon is testing out drone delivery in B.C., akin to a pilot test project the company launched in the U.K. last year.

eMarketer predicts e-commerce spending per capital will grow 64% by 2020.

“It has lagged for years, not because shoppers don’t want to shop online,” said Robin Sherk, a Toronto-based director of digital and retail insights at Kantar Retail, a consulting firm. “The retailers in Canada weren’t offering the services, it was the retailers that was lagging, not the shoppers.”

But Amazon on the playing field now means a number of brick and mortar retailers have to step up their A-game, Sherk added. Hudson’s Bay Company opened its own robotic facility in Scarborough in November to expedite their online orders.

“It’s the trip flexibility they can offer,” she said. “They have physical locations and that’s powerful. I think Canadian Tire is expanding their ‘Click and Collect’ program, so you can order online and drive to the store and load it in your trunk. Yes, retailers have to step up, but they have multiple ways to do that.”

In the U.S., Amazon has caused a chain reaction of a number of brick and mortar retailers to close shop, but analysts said it’s different in the True North.

“I think there are a lot of differences in the markets. It’s hard to make that 1:1 comparison,” Sherk said. “In the U.S., they are the most widely-shopped retailer in the country and that’s just not the case in Canada.”

This month, on July 11, Amazon held its third – and according to Robinson, “biggest” – Prime Day ever, labelled as a “global shopping event, offering more deals than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members,” which pay $79 year to get faster shipping on their orders.

She said at least 20 million items were sold on Prime Day by small and medium sized businesses.

Sherk said she’s watching for the growth in the Amazon Prime memberships in Canada.

“Prime is Amazon’s core shopper,” she said. “That is someone who has literally bought into their value proposition. Cause you’re paying for that membership. It’s a leading indicator of how Amazon is growing in the market. As you see that base grow, I think you’ll see more of the Amazon services expand in the market now. It will not only step up what Amazon can offer, but also step up the competition.”

HOW IT WORKS

Here’s how your Amazon.ca order gets fulfilled.

STOW:Products that come from manufacturers arrive in bins for employees to sort, scan and place in these stacked bins, which the robots hold. Electronics don’t go together in one place, either. Everything is scanned and stowed randomly into the bins based whether it will fit - almost like a game of Tetris. A second later – literally – it is now available for purchase on Amazon.ca, but will be stowed in these robots until someone buys it.

“She could put it up online and a customer could immediately order it,” said Ashley Robinson, Amazon’s operations communication manager. “This is one of the reasons why robotics enable faster fulfilment for us. We can have 50% more inventory on hand and we can fulfil a customer’s order within minutes.”

PICK:When someone buys something, then another station called, “Pick” has a worker who will see pictures of the ordered item on a screen and in which bin it’s located. The worker then examines the item to make sure it’s not damaged, scans it, and presses a button to confirm this item has been “picked” before putting it into a yellow tote that will run on a 10 kilometre conveyer belt to the shipping area. The robots also know how fast an associate picks item based on past data.

“They get a sense of what her cadence is, so they just work alongside with her,” said Robinson.

PACK: When items arrive at the warehouse, their dimensions and weight are already measured. This now menas the computer intel can assign the “optimal” type of box for the worker to use when preparing to ship out of the 25 available box sizes. The stickers that come out of the station are perfectly sized for that box, so no wasting time cutting strips of tape.

SLAM (Scan, label, apply and manifest): Another robotic station scans the item and customer information is printed on a label and a mechanical arm, using a puff of downward air, will affix the address label on the box. But before that happens, the item is weighed on a conveyer belt and if the weight doesn’t match with the item in the box, it would get kicked off the queue and a worker would double check the item to make sure it’s the correct item in the order. It’s another way of performing quality control, Robinson said. If the order is good to go, it gets loaded onto the delivery trucks – including Canada Post and UPS.

AUTOMATION NATION?

It looks like something out of an Isaac Asimov science-fiction story.

Canadians may be slowly outsourcing themselves to robots – and that may have a significant impact on the economy, according to an automation expert.

“We would expect automation to be freeing up people from mundane or dangerous tasks and moving them in to more creative and high-paying positions,” said Sunil Johal, policy director at University of Toronto’s Mowat Centre. “But in reality, we’re seeing that automation and artificial intelligence are actually threatening relatively well paying, stable jobs. Being a truck driver or an accountant cease to exist or will be significantly diminished in the coming years. There is definitely reason to be concerned.”

Johal said Amazon is “shaking up” the entire retail sector in America and is starting to do so in Canada as well because their business model heavily relies on technology with robots in their warehouses, not to mention their entire ordering system.

“You’re just going online and clicking what you want to purchase. I think this is absolutely a game changer in the retail sector,” he said. “The risk for Canadian retailers is they will just be squeezed out of the picture as more and more people turn to Amazon for purchases that just continues to solidify their position as a market leader. Once that trend starts, it can snowball very quickly.”

Automation will grow, Johal predicts. The trend is that Canadians will absolutely see increase of automation throughout all the sectors as technology gets cheaper and cheaper every year. Especially more automated ordering systems in the food service industry in the next five years.

“We’ll see more small and medium sized businesses look at options in this space and whether it makes more sense to automate certain tasks than to perform the same type of function,” he said.

But how much is too much?

Perhaps a discussion Canadians need to have with each other is whether to quell their desire for instant gratification – to get their Amazon packages on same-day delivery – in order to not push automation to replace all the jobs, Johal said.

“That’s the critical piece,” he said. “As consumers, we want things as quickly and as cheaply as possible, but as workers, we want good paying, stable jobs with benefits and there’s a disconnect between those two pieces. There’s a valuable discussion – can we really get everything on demand and cheaply and efficiently while still being able to pay people a decent living wage?”

jyuen@postmedia.com