An Amazon warehouse
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Inside Amazon's newer, robot-filled warehouses, the next big efficiency drive focuses on how humans move around the facilities, not just packages.If the plan works and scales, this could wring millions of labor hours out of the company's e-commerce operations every year, according to internal analysis viewed by Business Insider.These planning documents reveal Amazon is piloting a system called Full Facility Load Balancing, or FFLB, that automatically reassigns workers as package volumes and workloads change throughout the day.The goal, according to one of the documents, is to "remove the dependency on manual staffing decisions."Initial estimates show the technology could recover roughly $193 million annually in labor costs and cut almost 7 million labor hours each year.From packages to laborThe initiative reflects a broader shift inside Amazon's warehouses. After years of using robots and software to automate the flow of packages, the company is increasingly applying the same approach to labor decisions, such as staffing assignments that managers have traditionally handled manually.According to the documents, FFLB continuously evaluates package volumes, forecasts, and other operational signals to determine staffing needs across the warehouse. The system recalculates staffing requirements approximately every three minutes and recommends moving workers when one area appears overstaffed and another requires additional support.
