Almost all the news about Jeff Bezos is the drone for delivering devices. I am a distribution logistics geek, and what was more interesting to me is how amazon.com understands that utilizing space saves money and time. In the 60 minutes presentation.

The executives say they can now put twice as much stuff in the space when they allowed the mixing of different skus in the same location.

Twice as much stuff besides taking up less space means there is a sizable time savings in accessing the goods.

The system I worked on at Apple took an order and turned it into the boxes to be shipped, then sort the boxes to be picked easier, and place labels on them. Box #1 gets the packing list, the rest just get a label.

Amazon shows how they focused on dividing an incoming supply of material into dozens of smaller quantities to be efficiently put in a location. Think about it if you get 100 books and do things they way most would think you need to put let’s say 20 books on a shelf, then 80 in a box somewhere else. Amazon takes all 100 books and spreads them, putting them away once in the most efficient place to access them later.

This means all items in amazon.com’s inventory most likely has a universally unique ID. Besides being efficient, it makes it much easier to catch mistakes.

Flying drones gets the media’s attention. What got my attention is amazon gets how to manage every single item in its inventory.