It's been mentioned before (I think I saw it here) but trailers like these would be such a great launch platform for drones. They'd no longer be limited to X miles from the Distribution Center, but could just send relatively few trucks out to strategic locations optimized for that day's deliveries, and let the drones launch from there and automatically deliver.
Have battery-swapping robots on the truck too so that your drones can keep delivering packages without a long wait to charge.
30-minute deliveries seems only to be the tip of the iceberg for what drone-powered deliveries could facilitate.
But... how does the truck have the inventory to fulfill whatever is ordered, within 30 minutes? You don't know in advance what "the day's deliveries" are going to be, or where they will be, because the drone deliveries are on-demand.
At the scale amazon operates at, you probably do know in advance what the day's deliveries will be. I'm sure they could fill a truck with product, cruise a set route, and be reasonably certain it would all be delivered by the end of the day.
Your esoteric book orders probably don't need 30 minute prime air delivery though. Like a cdn, they can just stock the frequently requested items at the edge nodes.
I think on amazons scale, the number of people buying a good within a large area would have some near term predictability I would imagine. In fact I would be surprised if Amazon does not speculatively dispatch goods ahead of time to local warehouses based on projected demand for orders that have not been placed yet.
It made more sense a few years ago when there weren't distro centers near most major population centers and 1hr delivery options. Pre-shipping isn't going to be 1hr by much!
No, they just have urban area distro centers with commonly ordered products that would be desired quickly. Here in Seattle it's an old car dealership that's right near downtown--tons of space for delivery cars and enough for popular SKUs.
They already do this within the warehouses, with robot-pallets re-arranging themselves based on a slew of "big data" metrics, the same techniques can be applied forward to determine what to load on the trucks and how to deploy them.
A lot of people don't actually want or need 30minute delivery, and are perfectly happy with Amazon's free delivery that takes a few days. I can get two hour delivery here in London, but I've used it once.
Amazon could get a product to a local centre, then instead of sending a van out driving all day going to one customer after the other, they'll hit a few key locations near multiple customers and launch drones out to serve them at the same time.
Yeah, I wasn't thinking of the 30 minute delivery in this scenario, but rather an efficient next-day or same-day parcel delivery system. It'd presumably be much more efficient than door-to-door service. If we can perfect driverless vehicles also (driverless delivery trucks, anybody?), this would probably be the ideal delivery scheme. Heck, with that level of automation, if you time things right your trucks may never even need to come to a complete stop.
That said, you could probably extend the range of the 30-minute service with a strategy similar to this. Just bundle orders for 10 minutes, send vehicles 10 minutes out and then the drones fly 5-10 minutes to deliver the package.
Additionally, you could probably keep delivery trucks stocked with some of the top items as well and surprise/delight the customer with "Hey, we just so happen to have 30 minute delivery available now if you want it." I'm no SCM expert, though, so that could very well be a waste of more-valuable space.
So this is being implemented already from a local fulfillment center level, sans drones.
The actual mechanisms are actually super straightforward -- basically if a widget X sells Y amounts per day with Z variance in an area, get the low, low end of that to that warehouse/area so you only have to do last-mile delivery.
Then do it with operations research (well, linear algebra) on scale. :)
Not yet, but soon. First they need to buy the truck trailers to keep in stock, then they need to buy the larger truck trailers to transport the truck trailers during shipping.
What's not standard about them already? Like most things with Amazon they want to do faster/cheaper and not relying on third parties is a great way to do that.
Amazon is trying to build its own logistics with drones and is probably well aware of self driven trucks (which many automotive companies are testing ). To build on that, all it will need for now are those Truck Trailer. As the self driving automotive industry gets more mature in near future, their trucking partners will be replaced eventually. And who knows it might already be working on its own Self Driven automotive project.
Amazon will have to build efficient container or trailer management system if it has to use self driven trailers. May be this will give a little better idea on what I am talking about. http://fleetowner.com/blog/aiming-self-driving-freight
How soon will Amazon go into the freight business? After all they ran their own servers and then with excess capacity started AWS. So if a particular trailer is 75% full on a given run why not rent out the space?
If you're running dead head why not rent it out for a retail price rather than letting a freight broker fill it? A startup running on AWS could hand over its logistics to Amazon as well.
Well they also have planes and delivery people... It's not that far off. They also have distro centers all over the place so orders frequently come from within a few hours away (or less!) and not a few states away.
It might not be the end of the world because Amazon shipments have to be quite low margin, but yes I'm sure they are worried. What's probably more concerning is the fact that Amazon has a history of letting other people use their stack (AWS, Marketplace, etc) which could definitely do some damage to UPS/FedEx.
From people I know in the trucking business, the problem with delivering to Amazon's warehouses is inefficiencies in getting the trucks into and out of the yard. They're just not being run well. Stories of 50-truck-long queues being run off by the local police for blocking entrances to other nearby businesses..
Hopefully this will help, as the trucks can deadhead[0] to their warehouse and do a drop/hook[1], with the trailers being positioned to the warehouse doors by Amazon's own employees acting as yard dogs[2] for loading/unloading the contents. This lets Amazon manage the activity in their yard themselves and hopefully be more organized.
[0] Drive just the truck portion, without a trailer.
[1] The cab (only) portion of the truck drives to where the trailer is, hooks up and drives away with it. Upon delivery, they park the trailer in the yard, lower the landing legs and unhook.
[2] A yard dog is a specialized truck that is shorter and more maneuverable, able to make tighter turns in the confined spaces of a yard.
"[0] Drive just the truck portion, without a trailer."
I always thought that deadhead meant the trailer was empty on a backhaul (or whatever it's called). I guess no trailer is the equivalent of empty trailer?
Amazon is following Walmart playbook. This is what Walmart did to make sure timely (Just-in-Time) Delivery between their warehouse and retail locations.
There are business case study on how Walmart used their own freight truck network to beat their retail rivals by dedicating more space in a retail store to retail shelves instead of storing inventory.
This points to what I don't understand about the Amazon financial story.
Walmart built up their massive infrastructure business while being simultaneously immensely profitable. However, at Amazon, building out infrastructure comes at the expense of profits.
What am I missing that a lot of smart people are seeing in Amazon?
Pursuit of market share vs pursuit of profit. Amazon seems to want to dominate every market they want to get into. While Walmart focused on dominating one market - retail.
I compare Amazon story to Gold Rush. Once Amazon penetrates gold mining business, it wants to move into business of providing tools for gold mining, storage, distribution, and consumption. The profits from the initial gold mining efforts goes into building organizational infrastructure of gold vertical as well as entry into another new vertical.
They're deliberately trying to see just how far they can push the envelope of consumer surplus. It's a lot based in Sam Walton's philosophy, only moreso and with the sort of fanatical SiVa approach.
My grandparents were from Arkansas ( hence the moniker ) and the frugality ethos Sam Walton lived is how they lived.
What you are seeing is people going very long.
Everything at Amazon is an API. That's very real leadership. I doubt that will stop until everything everywhere ( except for small reservations of respite from this phenomenon ) is an API. And WalMart is not in any way any sort of aggregator. You bend to their will to sell through them. It's an unpleasant process. I'm not even sure Amazon knows their little stores are there much.
First thing I thought when I saw this was autonomous trucks. I think this could be a good way for them to ease into a position where they have enough trucks on the road so they can justify working toward autonomous shipping. Right now they are making huge savings in their warehouse with kiva, I'm sure they want to expand that to other parts of their operation.
Maybe a new model Kiva that has larger wheels that can make it across the door-trailer gap. If there's a ramp and a height difference, the goods (presumably on a pallet of some kind) can't tip over.
Right now the weight is still on the wheels and each additional load strains the suspension. Most trailers have pneumatic load balancing, so the bed drops with the load and then slowly pumps back up. Because of this a free-floating hydraulic ramp is needed. These interfaces are finicky and an unnecessary bottleneck. I've managed to get a 5 ton lift stuck on the ramp before.
I would put anchor points akin to trailer hitches on the back corners of the bed. The driver backs up to the bay, aligns the posts over the hitch, and hydraulics lift the hitches until they mate with the posts. Next they would lift up the truck bed, pull the truck back towards the bay, and set it down in a grove so the bed and warehouse floor are perfectly aligned. It would be similar to how a u-haul ramp mates with the truck bed (https://youtu.be/Ch7ukPPtZOI?t=46s), except you would be mating the truck bed with a building.
You could also have a giant drawbridge style ramp that lowers down and anchors to the back of the truck bed. It could double as the bay door. You could also add in outriggers that hold the bed at one height during loading. Alignment would be tough. Possibly the outriggers could sink into divots in the ground and shift the bed into position.
Both of these would also add a full width mating, which would allow for multiple bots to load at the same time.
Heck, I like the idea of having 4 hydraulic lifts, one for each corner of the bed, and have them lift the trailer up until it is flush with the warehouse. This would allow for the added perk of making taller, 2 story trailer beds and loading in two sets of shelves.
There are infinite possibilities, but I would be many of them are cheap enough to be worth the investment. One this is for sure, operating a lift is boring and I have way to much time to think on the job.
My bet: Amazon has an incentive to get the trailers but not the trucks yet because they will get into trucks once they can invest in autonomous trucks.
Having their own trailers allows them to explore the roboticization of loading and unloading them now. i.e. Kiva Robotics meets truck trailer loading and unloading.
Moving their inventory into trucks but still tracked and managed by their Kiva Robotics systems also lets them reduce land costs and possibly even eliminate nexus in certain states for tax reasons since they could have these mini warehouses drive from a low tax state to a high tax state for deployment.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadHave battery-swapping robots on the truck too so that your drones can keep delivering packages without a long wait to charge.
30-minute deliveries seems only to be the tip of the iceberg for what drone-powered deliveries could facilitate.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/
Amazon could get a product to a local centre, then instead of sending a van out driving all day going to one customer after the other, they'll hit a few key locations near multiple customers and launch drones out to serve them at the same time.
That said, you could probably extend the range of the 30-minute service with a strategy similar to this. Just bundle orders for 10 minutes, send vehicles 10 minutes out and then the drones fly 5-10 minutes to deliver the package.
Additionally, you could probably keep delivery trucks stocked with some of the top items as well and surprise/delight the customer with "Hey, we just so happen to have 30 minute delivery available now if you want it." I'm no SCM expert, though, so that could very well be a waste of more-valuable space.
The actual mechanisms are actually super straightforward -- basically if a widget X sells Y amounts per day with Z variance in an area, get the low, low end of that to that warehouse/area so you only have to do last-mile delivery.
Then do it with operations research (well, linear algebra) on scale. :)
http://twistedsifter.com/2012/04/blue-marlin-giant-ship-that...
It's not recommended for customers who lack high-speed, unlimited data plans.
If you're running dead head why not rent it out for a retail price rather than letting a freight broker fill it? A startup running on AWS could hand over its logistics to Amazon as well.
http://services.amazon.com/fulfillment-by-amazon/benefits.ht...
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/a-secretive-air-cargo-opera...
http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/24/9790916/amazon-air-cargo-...
Hopefully this will help, as the trucks can deadhead[0] to their warehouse and do a drop/hook[1], with the trailers being positioned to the warehouse doors by Amazon's own employees acting as yard dogs[2] for loading/unloading the contents. This lets Amazon manage the activity in their yard themselves and hopefully be more organized.
[0] Drive just the truck portion, without a trailer.
[1] The cab (only) portion of the truck drives to where the trailer is, hooks up and drives away with it. Upon delivery, they park the trailer in the yard, lower the landing legs and unhook.
[2] A yard dog is a specialized truck that is shorter and more maneuverable, able to make tighter turns in the confined spaces of a yard.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Trucking/comments/3uzlzs/16_hours_a...?
I always thought that deadhead meant the trailer was empty on a backhaul (or whatever it's called). I guess no trailer is the equivalent of empty trailer?
[1]: http://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-unwraps-new-truck-trailers-j... [2]: http://www.trucknews.com/health-safety/trailer-underride-gua...
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/48/2/1
There are business case study on how Walmart used their own freight truck network to beat their retail rivals by dedicating more space in a retail store to retail shelves instead of storing inventory.
WalMart was the first retail network to roll up the whole day every day into a single ( green-bar) report on Mr. Sam's desk.
Walmart built up their massive infrastructure business while being simultaneously immensely profitable. However, at Amazon, building out infrastructure comes at the expense of profits.
What am I missing that a lot of smart people are seeing in Amazon?
I compare Amazon story to Gold Rush. Once Amazon penetrates gold mining business, it wants to move into business of providing tools for gold mining, storage, distribution, and consumption. The profits from the initial gold mining efforts goes into building organizational infrastructure of gold vertical as well as entry into another new vertical.
My grandparents were from Arkansas ( hence the moniker ) and the frugality ethos Sam Walton lived is how they lived.
What you are seeing is people going very long.
Everything at Amazon is an API. That's very real leadership. I doubt that will stop until everything everywhere ( except for small reservations of respite from this phenomenon ) is an API. And WalMart is not in any way any sort of aggregator. You bend to their will to sell through them. It's an unpleasant process. I'm not even sure Amazon knows their little stores are there much.
That's why imo Amazon is a big hype machine. All of these warehouses speed delivery but add overheads.
Their stock pricing assumes they are a tech play that they'll magically achieve walmart style scope with high margins.
I wonder what happens when rates spike.
I've loaded and unloaded trucks for about a year. Being able to load and unload autonomously would save plenty of time and money.
Right now the weight is still on the wheels and each additional load strains the suspension. Most trailers have pneumatic load balancing, so the bed drops with the load and then slowly pumps back up. Because of this a free-floating hydraulic ramp is needed. These interfaces are finicky and an unnecessary bottleneck. I've managed to get a 5 ton lift stuck on the ramp before.
I would put anchor points akin to trailer hitches on the back corners of the bed. The driver backs up to the bay, aligns the posts over the hitch, and hydraulics lift the hitches until they mate with the posts. Next they would lift up the truck bed, pull the truck back towards the bay, and set it down in a grove so the bed and warehouse floor are perfectly aligned. It would be similar to how a u-haul ramp mates with the truck bed (https://youtu.be/Ch7ukPPtZOI?t=46s), except you would be mating the truck bed with a building.
You could also have a giant drawbridge style ramp that lowers down and anchors to the back of the truck bed. It could double as the bay door. You could also add in outriggers that hold the bed at one height during loading. Alignment would be tough. Possibly the outriggers could sink into divots in the ground and shift the bed into position.
Both of these would also add a full width mating, which would allow for multiple bots to load at the same time.
Heck, I like the idea of having 4 hydraulic lifts, one for each corner of the bed, and have them lift the trailer up until it is flush with the warehouse. This would allow for the added perk of making taller, 2 story trailer beds and loading in two sets of shelves.
There are infinite possibilities, but I would be many of them are cheap enough to be worth the investment. One this is for sure, operating a lift is boring and I have way to much time to think on the job.
I've loaded and unloaded trucks for about a year. Being able to load and unload autonomously would save plenty of time and money.
Having their own trailers allows them to explore the roboticization of loading and unloading them now. i.e. Kiva Robotics meets truck trailer loading and unloading.
Moving their inventory into trucks but still tracked and managed by their Kiva Robotics systems also lets them reduce land costs and possibly even eliminate nexus in certain states for tax reasons since they could have these mini warehouses drive from a low tax state to a high tax state for deployment.