Jon Miller has dedicated his 25+ year career to the field of kaizen, continuous improvement, and lean management. Jon spent the first eighteen years of his life in Japan, then graduated from McGill University with a bachelor’s in linguistics.
Amazon is trying something new in an effort to reduce packaging materials as well as the amount of fuel burned by making fewer deliveries. According to the article Amazon’s new waste reduction strategy: deliver only once a week, when Prime members enroll in the “Amazon Day” service, “Amazon will hold everything they order throughout the week and deliver the items together on the customer’s selected day.” In other words, Amazon is reducing waste by giving the customer the option to batch their weekly orders to arrive only once per week, instead of one at a time. This is fascinating. On the one hand it is clear that combining a customer’s multiple orders from a week into a single weekly delivery to will reduce packaging waste. But in terms of reducing energy waste and improving carbon footprint, I am skeptical that this new Amazon Day service will be a positive contributor. Batching is OK when it buffers an unavoidable transaction cost, such as capacity lost to changeovers or transportation, provided that said capacity is the most important factor. The total system cost of batching is often higher than the local cost of increased setups or deliveries. Lean aims for the best of both worlds by keeping batch sizes as small as possible while reducing said transaction costs. Here are some scenarios on how Amazon Day may play out. Success by design. In the best-case scenario, a combination of big data, massive computing power and smart people well-versed in how flow works in supply chains on continental scales have built Amazon Day around tested algorithms. If there was low-hanging fruit in the form of frequent high-energy-consumption deliveries to remote locations, weekly batching could make sense. Flying one small package per day to a remote dwelling in Alaska would use both more packaging and energy than delivering a week’s worth of orders only once weekly. Perhaps Amazon’s models show that the USA is a spiderweb of many small deliveries to remote areas, just waiting to be weekly-batched into efficiency. More than 80% of people in the USA live in urban areas. This number is just over half worldwide and increasing. Convenience and cluster. Prime customers choose to receive their weekly deliveries when it is most convenient to them. This causes a weekly crunch when weekly deliveries cluster on late Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon, as opposed to work days. Packing costs are reduced, delivery is less smooth, costs increase with weekend pay, and supply-demand imbalance for drivers. Incentivized smoothing. Amazon recognizes that they want delivery batches to be smoothed out across the transportation system, rather than clustered on days most convenient for humans. Amazon gives people incentives to spread out the weekly delivery days. This could be a shipping cost discounts for choosing Thursday morning instead of Saturday… except that shipping is already free on for Prime members. Leveled pull from buffer. Level-loaded delivery in the Lean model (heijunka) relies on pulling from a finished goods stock or some controlled stocking point. A buffer is essential, in other words, to avoid the whiplash effect from needing to fill larg orders one day and none the next. Since Amazon delivers everything off the shelf, lead-time bullwhip is a non-issue. Intra-week fluctuation and burden on warehouse labor would be the main issue. It is unlikely that Amazon would pick orders in advance and keep them in a box until closing it up on the weekly ship date, as there would be half-empty boxes everywhere, much double and triple-handling. This is a logistical problem Amazon is well-equipped to handle. However, should USPS and UPS need to level their load to smooth out the spikes caused by weekly deliveries, their task would be a far greater challenge. It’s a wash. Assuming customers’ choice of the once-weekly delivery days did not cluster, but was distributed evenly, there would be savings in terms of packaging materials but the energy used for delivery would be mostly a wash. The same number of items are being delivered on a weekly aggregate basis. The only difference is, for example, that instead of every house on your street receiving between zero and three boxes per day, each would receive between zero and ten only one day per week. Amazon would need to start batching by delivery route, such that a truck visits a region or neighborhood only once per week, for this to yield energy savings. With even the USPS delivering on Sundays, it seems unlikely that this is a horse that will go quietly back into the barn. Reduced cardboard, increased chaos. In some parts, orders will cluster and delivery will spike on certain days. In others, there will be no change. In yet others, a blend. If it was possible to manage these different delivery behaviors as coherent customer groups, or value streams, processes could more readily be managed and improved. If tens of millions of individual human consumers are allowed the choice of batching or not, disruption to the routines of warehouse workers and delivery companies may be the reward. Emptier trucks on some days. The 80/20 rule. There are just over 100 million Amazon Prime members who are eligible for this service. It is estimated that 80% of them are in the USA, representing 63% of Amazon’s US customers. That may seem like a lot, abut if Pareto’s law holds true, all it takes is a small minority of customers who insist on daily deliveries to wipe out any savings from batching. The orders of the 37% non-Prime members would still keep the delivery trucks on the road 7 days a week, even if every Prime member opted to batch weekly. Trucks would be two-thirds emptier on many days, perhaps burning less fuel. Heijunka is when the producer takes advantage of their agility to delay the decision to commit resources toward delivering the customer’s specific order until the last possible moment. This is enabled by having low transaction costs, very short queues and few non-productive process delays. Amazon Day allows the Prime customers to set the weekly delivery date. This is in effect batches the pick date for one week worth of orders. Amazon risks trading demand spikes for picking in their warehouse for savings to packaging materials. I struggle to see how giving two-thirds of the customers in the USA market the option to batch their orders for delivery by week, based on whim rather than on a heijunka algorithm, will deliver a net energy savings. I have so many questions about this, but alas not the access to Amazon’s big data, computing power or thinking behind this. I do know how flow works. I also know that no amount of data and computation will make up for faulty modeling. Amazon are smart people so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. They must have done the research on the effects of batch size on supply chains, developed algorithms that show smoothed delivery loads, and a high probability of energy savings. But my suspicion is that as a business idea, this is more Fire than AWS.
中国机械学会认证工业工程师,米其林轮胎认证“工业工程师”，艾默生电气认证 “Lean Champion”，亚马逊认证六西格玛黑带（ASAT)，上海精益六西格玛委员会专家委员，前亚马逊物流中国ACES 项目经理，拥有超过多年的卓越运营机制建设及企业绩效提升实战经验。在价值管理、流程设计与优化、精益六西格玛转型、精益供应链、精益仓储物流，精益服务业,压缩交付周期、减少库存、提高生产效率等方面有丰富的实战经验。 |
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