Inside a roughly 3.6 million-square-foot facility on San Antonio's East Side, robots and employees work in tandem, processing and preparing packages to send to customers around the world.
Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) has opened its first Amazon Robotics Fulfillment Center in San Antonio. The building, which has five-and-a-half floors and spans more than 3.6 million square feet, opened in March and is among the largest Amazon Fulfillment Centers in Texas.
SAT3 is known as an Amazon Robotics Sortable fulfillment center, or ARS. Unlike traditional non-sortable centers, where associates pick, pack and ship bulkier, larger-sized items, SAT3 utilizes a combination of robotics and associates to pick, package and ship customer orders. Automation has enabled the fulfillment center to be incredibly efficient, with over 2 million items departing the facility each week, says Angelo Facca, general manager of SAT3.
"A lot of records were broken here at this site in terms of what it's capable [of]," Facca said.
There are several legs in the journey of an item that comes through SAT3. On each floor, there are between 26,000 and 28,000 pods, or storage units, delivered by robots to one of 128 pick stations. The pick stations are manned by associates, who use a digital interface to pick items and transport them to another floor for packaging. Packaged items are then sent via conveyance to the robotics floor, where they are sorted and dropped via a robotic arm into the appropriate chutes for shipment.
"I don't think sometimes there's that appreciation for the technology that goes on behind the scenes," Facca said. "Our customers look online, and they pick an order. But the technology that we have here is very impressive."
Inside the Amazon Robotics Fulfillment Center
Along with delivering items faster to its customers, SAT3 has also exceeded employment projections. In December 2020, Amazon, in partnership with greater:SATX, announced plans to bring SAT3 and two other Amazon facilities to San Antonio, projecting that the facilities would create 1,500 new full-time jobs. Today, SAT3 alone employs more than 1,700 people.
With the facility still in its launch phase, there's a lot of room to scale, which means hiring even more employees, says Facca. While he could not pinpoint how many more employees Amazon will hire, Facca said, "I think we're positioned to take a bigger chunk of the Amazon product that's out there in similar buildings and bring it here."
Robotics has opened up a wealth of job opportunities in robot operation and maintenance. While certain roles require specialized education, SAT3 offers training in conveyance and robot maintenance, enabling its employees to move into higher-skill, higher-paid positions.
"The sky's the limit in terms of opportunity," Facca said.
As SAT3 scales up, leadership also has plans to expand automation into new areas, says Briannica Tye, regional director of SAT3.
"We're going to figure out how to make it work better for our associates, how to make it work better for our teams and our customers," said Tye. "We'll continue to figure out ways to eliminate redundancy, eliminate repetitive motion, and use our technology to make our associates' jobs easier."
Since 2010, Amazon has created more than 43,000 jobs in Texas and invested more than $16.9 billion across the state, greater:SATX reports. Amazon's investments have contributed more than $18.8 billion to the state GDP and created more than 49,000 indirect jobs, from construction and logistics to professional services.
More than 116,000 independent small and medium businesses sell their products to customers via Amazon, creating thousands of additional jobs throughout the state.
