Amazon shows off high-tech Patterson fulfillment center

More than a year after the first product shipped, a grand opening was held at the Amazon fulfillment center in western Stanislaus County on Tuesday.

Dignitaries, media and students from Patterson Joint Unified School District got a glimpse of the inner workings of the 1 million-square-foot facility and its proprietary technology, including the Kiva robots.

The robots, which resemble giant hockey pucks carrying racks, can haul up to 3,000 pounds of merchandise. They bring a rack to an Amazon employee to stock or to retrieve products when an order is filled.

The robots take a few hours out of the fulfillment process by taking out the walking the associate would have to do, said Mike Roth, Amazon’s vice president of North American operations.

The facility also has four miles of conveyor belts to quickly move smaller products and the muscle of a robot dubbed “the Armazon” that can lift up to 6 tons from the ground floor to the 24-feet-high mezzanine level.

The fulfillment center in Patterson stores large items — anything larger than 18 inches — such as televisions, appliances, baseball bats and boxes of diapers, said Amazon spokeswoman Ashley Robinson.

The distribution center in Tracy ships items of less than 18 inches, such as books and DVDs. That center’s robots are smaller; they can carry as much as 700 pounds.

There are about two robots for every full-time employee in Tracy.

Amazon doesn’t reveal exactly how many employees it has at its facilities, but Robinson said there are more than 500 in Patterson and more than 1,500 in Tracy.

Roth said tens of thousands of packages move through Patterson each day.

“Some might stay a few hours, some might stay a few weeks,” he said. “It depends on how often we get it. It depends on how high the customer demand is.”

Orders are shipped throughout the region, across the country and worldwide to 185 countries, Roth said.

“We manufacture the carton to basically just contain the item inside,” Roth said. “We call that ‘box on demand.’ We measure the item and then this machine creates a box that size.”

It saves on packaging material and the space required to store boxes in a vast array of sizes.

Loading the boxes into the trucks “is like ‘Tetris’ on a very, very large scale,” Roth said.

He pointed to hall of fame posters around the loading docks that picture employees standing next to perfectly loaded trucks with boxes stacked so methodically that a credit card couldn’t fit in the space that remains.

“These facilities don’t run without very motivated, very capable, engaged associates,” Roth said. “All this technology would mean nothing if you don’t have great associates to use the technology.”