ROSS LED DECKER to a door at the end of the hall. It opened up to a mezzanine with a bird’s-eye view of the vast main floor.
“I have that window in my office so I can keep an eye on people coming and going in the management section,” said Ross. “But here is where I really focus a lot of my attention. Because this is where the money is made.”
Decker looked out over a sea of shelving and miles of conveyor belts, and people and both fixed and mobile robots working in seemingly perfect synchronization.
“Looks like a lot of moving pieces,” he noted.
“This place is one big algorithm,” said Ross, nodding. “But the general concept is pretty simple. We get product in and we have to get product out as fast and as accurately as possible.”
He pointed to the back side of the facility where the loading docks were located. “Product coming off the trucks is opened, scanned, and put in those blue totes. The conveyor belts you’re seeing route it to different parts of the FC.” He looked at Decker. “Short for ‘fulfillment center.’ Once it gets to its destination inside here it’s unloaded and scanned again, along with a barcode scan of its cubby location on the shelves.”
“Cubby location?” asked Decker.
“Right. All the metal shelving you see is divided into small cubbies with barcodes and alphanumeric IDs. It’s kind of like the old library catalog card system, only now it’s digital. When orders come in, and they do at the rate of hundreds per second, the pickers—they’re the ones in the yellow vests—use handheld scanners to find the product to fill the order. They scan the item and place it in the tote. Once the tote is full, it goes to the conveyor belt system.”
“How does it get there?”
“Either by humans carrying it or using rolling carts, or robots do the task.” He pointed to one device rolling along that looked like a large upright vacuum. “That’s an AMR, which stands for autonomous mobile robot. It carries the full tote to the belts using embedded intelligence and application software, its brain if you will.”
He pointed to another device that was carrying a large shelving unit. “That’s a lifting robot. It looks like one of those robot vacuum cleaners, but it can hoist thousands of pounds on those specially built shelving pods. It moves on a predefined grid system to where it needs to go.”
Ross indicated another section of the facility.
“Now, the products arrive there, at the prepackaging stations. The items are sorted into small slots on tall wheeled shelves. Each slot equals one order, because now you’re going from bulk to individual orders and the funnel gets really narrow. You deliver the wrong stuff to someone, well, that’s not good. The shelves are then rolled to the packaging stations, where they’re packed for shipment.”
“By people, I see,” said Decker.
“Robots can’t really pack. At least not yet. An algorithm spits out the right-sized box for each order, rollers kick out the air cushion bags for packing the item in the box as well as the tape to seal it. Then it goes down the belt to the labeling machine where the mailing label is put on. Then it goes to the loading docks where the boxes are put on trucks. Sort of like a jigsaw puzzle because every truck has to be packed as tightly as possible. A couple of wasted inches matters when you’re shipping millions of packages.”
“And people load the trucks as well?”
“Yeah, robots can’t do that either. Yet.”
“You keep saying yet.”
Ross looked at him. “There’s one major problem with robots. They don’t have hands like humans. You see those fixed robotic arms over there?”
Decker glanced where he was pointing to see a row of large metal arms lifting huge pallets onto high shelves at the back of the facility.
Ross said, “Now, that’s a great application for a robot. Weights that humans can’t lift safely. One direction, one spot to place it on. It does not require fine motor skills, only brute strength. Humans can feel things with their hands and work in small spaces in ways that robots can’t right now. They can make snap judgments about moving something an inch here or there because it works better. They can also recognize new products they may never have seen before and be able to deal with them on the fly. Right now, robots can’t do that reliably. But the industry is working on it. In fact, the Holy Grail in the FC business is something called reliable grasping mechanisms, which is a fancy term for making robots act more human when they’re picking up things and putting them in specific places. It’ll get solved one day, because people get sick, take bathroom breaks, eat lunch, get tired, and need a vacation and health care insurance. With robots all those things go away.”
“So you’re saying one day this place will just have robots?”
“Businesses don’t give a crap about creating jobs. They care about making money. With robots, you’ll just need some tech guys to maintain and repair them.”
“But if people don’t have jobs to make money, who’s going to buy all the stuff on those shelves?” asked Decker.
Ross grinned. “I don’t think the rich guys have thought that one through. Probably leaving it for the government to figure out. God help us if that’s the case.”
Decker pointed to a set of doors along a far wall. “Are those magnetometers?”
“Yes. That’s the employee entrance. We call our employees ‘associates.’ Anyway, as with any business, you have to deal with theft. They have to go through the magnetometers and also have their bags searched.”
“Does everybody have to go through it?” asked Decker.
“Yep, me included.”
“I understand the physical demands of working here are pretty tough.”
“We have to fill about four hundred orders a second, so it’s nonstop movement. A picker’s handheld device will receive a ping every time an order is placed. And the system directs the picker to the shelf where that item is. And the process starts. The workers here have to be able to lift about fifty pounds and walk or stand for up to twelve hours a day. And you’ll probably end up walking fifteen miles in a shift. But, hey, walking is good exercise, right? I make my rounds every day at the same time, checking on things.” He looked at his watch. “In fact, I’ll be heading out in about an hour to do just that. I get to hobnob with the workers, and it’s good for them to see management out there on the floor. But it’s not all fun and games. I have other managers on the floor and their job is to make sure the work gets done. We ride the people pretty hard, because upper level management rides us pretty hard. We don’t hit our quotas we’re looking for another job. And this place is so big it could hold over twenty football fields, so there’s a lot of ground to cover. We sometimes even ride bikes or three-wheelers to get to places faster and cover as much ground as possible. And with the new addition it’ll be half again bigger. And we have a climate control system, but it can still get pretty hot.”
“Well, obviously people want to work here.”
“The pay is good. Pickers start out at ten bucks an hour, plus health care and a 401(k) plan. You’re here five years, you’re making sixteen an hour. And we give out a decent amount of overtime and during big crunch periods like Christmas we have mandatory overtime, where they’ll work fifty-five to seventy hours a week. With the overtime, a lot of people here earn forty grand a year or more. These days that puts you in the middle class, especially if both husband and wife work here, and we have a lot of those. And hell, in this town that could even make you rich.”
“But Frank Mitchell told me you had trouble finding workers?”
“And he probably told you why. We have about a thousand employees but we always need more. And we’ll definitely need more with the new addition coming online. Problem is hundreds of the applicants couldn’t pass a drug test. Hell, it’s like that all over the country. Kids, parents, grandparents, all hooked on crap.” He paused. “There you have it, the world of the FCs.”
“Now let’s go to the world where Frank Mitchell lost his life,” said Decker.
Ross led Decker down a set of metal steps to the main floor and then down a long concourse to where the addition was being constructed. He had to unlock a door and they stepped into a cavernous area that largely resembled the space that they had just left. Only there were no people here and no products on the towering shelves.
“Normally there would be lots of construction workers here, but the police have closed that down while they investigate. I hope they let them back in soon. I’ve already gotten calls from management. They’re not happy about the shutdown. We’re on a tight time frame to get this piece done.”
“Cops don’t care about construction schedules.”
“I know that. I was on the phone with management when you showed up. I mean, I’m sure they’re sad that Frank died. Nobody deserved what happened to him, but it’s still a business.”
“Right,” said Decker, looking around. “So where did it happen?”
“Over here.”
Ross led him to an area on one side of the addition.
There was a column of robotic arms located here, although the tall shelves they would be lifting boxes onto were not yet in place. It was only concrete walls.
And on one section of wall Decker could see bloodstains and other human matter. Around the robotic arm at this space was yellow police tape.
“We’re not supposed to go inside the tape,” said Ross. “I guess you already know that,” he added hastily.
“Have the police gone over the area?”
“They were in yesterday and early this morning. Photos and diagrams and measuring stuff and dusting surfaces.”
“Pretty routine for something like this,” noted Decker. “Has anyone checked that robotic arm to see what happened?”
“The company that installed it is sending a team in to go over it with a fine-toothed comb. We have to get this figured out. I mean, this cannot happen again. No way. When Frank was found the thing still had a hold of him. He was smashed up against that wall. The arm can move in slow motions, or it can do rapid movements with enough force to rip your head off.”
“Why was Frank here last night?”
“Part of his job was to oversee things in the addition. He would normally make rounds through here right before he left for the day. The construction workers get in at seven and knock off around five. I wasn’t here when it happened, but I got a call telling me about it.”
“Who called?”
“Marjorie Linton. She’s in operations. She and Frank worked together. She knew that he had gone to check some things out. When he didn’t return, she tried his cell phone but he didn’t answer. Then she went to look for him. And found his body.”
“And then she called you?”
“Yes. She was hysterical. I was the one who called the police after I got her to calm down so I could understand what she was saying.”
Decker looked at the murderous robotic arm. “So he would have been here inspecting the robot?”
“Sure, he could have been. Frank knew how the different robots functioned.”
“So the thing was operational?”
“Well, it was powered up but it wasn’t on. We had tested it, or the company that manufactured it had, on site about a week ago. Everything was good to go.”
“So how did it kill him?”
“That’s why the robotic company is sending a team in. We won’t know until they do their diagnostic.”
“But will they be able to tell? To give a definitive answer?”
Ross shrugged. “I don’t have the technical expertise to answer that. I hope so, because, like I said, we have to make sure this never happens again.”
Decker looked at the bloody wall. “Well, once is one time too many.”
They walked past a large table on their way back to the fulfillment center. Decker noted the unrolled sheaf of papers on it.
“What’s that?” he asked.
Ross walked over to the table. “Construction drawings for the addition. It’s pretty much the existing one just halved in size. Why?”
Decker stared down at the drawings, the mental frames flowing past in his head, until he arrived at one, and then moved on to a second one. When he put the two together in his head, it literally clicked inside his brain.
At least his memory seemed to be working okay now.
“No reason,” he said.