Last week I had a chance to sit down with Andrew Cox from FreightWaves TV to chat about Amazon's early days and what learnings from that period can be applied today for everyone else who isn't Amazon.
➜ You can watch the replay of the interview here.
The short explanation: Keep things simple.
We kept a lot of experiments simple on purpose. Manual work helped us test and understand improvements before implementing a fully automated solution.
In the same spirit, we simplified the physical aspect of fulfillment by moving complexity to software components. The laws of physics make it hard to test, experiment, and scale automations. Software, meanwhile, can always be changed with enough resources available.
You don't need 100 warehouses and an insanely complex fulfillment network to profitably meet customer delivery expectations because you can handle a lot of the complexity via software.
Jason Murray
CEO
Jason is co-founder and CEO of Shipium where he guides the company's vision towards becoming the world’s best supply chain technology platform for ecommerce and retail. Prior to founding Shipium, he spent 19 years at Amazon as VP of Retail Systems and VP of Forecasting & Supply Chain. While there he owned the global software and operations group that powered Prime, Subscribe & Save and Pricing. He is a University of Washington grad and an engineer at heart who loves solving complex scaling problems.
