Short clip: Zappos tracking shoes through the supply chain

April 15, 2008, 9:59am PDT | Length: 00:01:07
Brent Cromley, director of development at Zappos.com, describes a new inventory management system that uses alogrithms to determine the location of an item in the Zappos.com warehouse.

Transcript

Short clip: Zappos tracking shoes through the supply chain

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>> Let me ask you about the warehouse itself. Obviously, it's a supply chain management, inventory management and what do you do to optimize in terms of the value you can bring to the business from the back end systems?

>> Well, our inventory system in our warehouse is what we call Random Put Away. We don't try to align products together. What we do is when we're putting away products as they come into the warehouse we just pick any random location and put that product there. Our inventory management system is able to track the location of every product at every point in time. So when it comes time to pick the product the customer places the order, a person will walk around the warehouse, find the closest and we have some algorithms to determine the closest product to their proximity, find that and put that on the conveyor system. So we've really done a lot of work to make that as efficient as possible and make sure that we can get the product as quickly as possible on the truck shipping out to the customer.

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==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====

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