Amazon · Grocery
Four hubs, forty-five sites
I owned the retail side of Amazon’s first multi-temperature grocery hubs.
- 4 hubs
- Launched, with a fifth planned
- 45+ sites
- Relaunched, and supplied by the hubs
- 3 days
- Taken off vendor lead times
The problem
Amazon was relaunching more than 45 of its urban fulfillment centers in under a year. Each one was a full flip: new shelving, a new assortment, a new website, and new back-end operations.
None of it worked without the product. Those sites had no way of their own to get the chilled, frozen, and shelf-stable grocery and CPG assortment they needed to open.
What I did
I was the retail-side owner for the hub network that would supply them. I built the economic models for which vendors should ship through a hub and which shouldn’t, and set up milk runs and less-than-truckload routes to bring the inbound cost down. I wrote buying logic that knew how much each building could hold, so we didn’t bury a hub in pallets.
On the relaunch itself, I worked the assortment and inventory side.
What changed
Four hubs launched, with the plan written for a fifth. They fed a buying model for more than 45 downstream sites and 60 vendors and distributors. Vendor lead times came down about three days. Inventory shrink improved 15 to 20%, and about 30% of the manual work went away once the reporting was automated.