If Amazon’s Supply Chain Normalizes - Efficiency Will Be Gained
It's a popular opinion that Amazon, one of the greatest supply chain companies in retail, will emerge even stronger out of this situation. I wanted to analyze why this is all happening.
Those who have experience with agile software over traditional waterfall methods know that one of the reasons it demand so much efficiency and improvement from the team is that sprint length is very short. And the shorter you make sprints, the better your processes and communication need to be, and the more waste you need to reduce.
Well, preparing for Black Friday is like giving someone months to prepare for a big software release. Whereas what we have now is Black Friday every day for the company. It's been very apparent the consumer and seller-facing restrictions -but what is not seen behind the scenes are the internal improvements being forced into action based on the sustained increased volume.
CNBC has chronicled all the demand-softening Amazon has done to keep up.
Consumers and sellers don't see it now - but when volume normalizes, I think you will see Amazon raise the bar significantly higher again on its 1 day standards, FBA check-in and shipment turnaround times, etc. All the new processes will be doubly effective in a time of normal volume.
