5 ms·

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

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.

notatoad 11y ago
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.
- dman 11y ago
  We appear to be perfectly in sync!
- ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
  Considering the more esoteric books I've ordered off Amazon...I dunno how they'd stock them like that.
  - notatoad 11y ago
    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.
dman 11y ago
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.
- jonknee 11y ago
  They even have a patent for shipping orders to customers before they are anticipated to purchase it (pre-order delivery!). http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    Whoever dreamed that up was watching minority report.
    - jonknee 11y ago
      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!
      - gtremper 11y ago
        Maybe that's how they've implemented 1hr shipping?
        jonknee 11y ago
        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.
- Phlarp 11y ago
  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.
bennjs 11y ago
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.
- jonknee 11y ago
  Their goal is not have free delivery take a couple of days. I got a free same day delivery recently and that's definitely what they aiming for.
andrewstuart2 11y ago
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.
binarysolo 11y ago
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. :)

notatoad 11y ago

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.

dman 11y ago
We appear to be perfectly in sync!
ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
Considering the more esoteric books I've ordered off Amazon...I dunno how they'd stock them like that.
- notatoad 11y ago
  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.

dman 11y ago

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.

jonknee 11y ago
They even have a patent for shipping orders to customers before they are anticipated to purchase it (pre-order delivery!). http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/18/amazon-pre-ships/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jacquesm 11y ago
  Whoever dreamed that up was watching minority report.
  - jonknee 11y ago
    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!
    - gtremper 11y ago
      Maybe that's how they've implemented 1hr shipping?
      - jonknee 11y ago
        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.
Phlarp 11y ago
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.

bennjs 11y ago

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.

jonknee 11y ago
Their goal is not have free delivery take a couple of days. I got a free same day delivery recently and that's definitely what they aiming for.

andrewstuart2 11y ago

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.

binarysolo 11y ago

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. :)