I just finished a really energizing visit with our teams in India and the UAE. Our customers – no matter where they are around the world – love vast selection, low prices, and fast delivery. But each region has important differences – different retail environments, different selling partners, and different business practices. As a result, meeting our customers’ needs in each geography is a bit like solving a Rubik’s Cube, figuring out the right combination of capabilities and processes to make each business work. It takes creativity, inventiveness, and – just like a Rubik’s Cube – a lot of persistence.
I loved learning about the unique solutions the teams have developed to serve our customers. In India, for example, the team partners with local mom-and-pop stores in the community who execute local deliveries for Amazon during their slow times. I visited Manasa Bakery in Bangalore, one of our partners, to learn how the process works and joined them in a few of their deliveries. It was creative and, most importantly, fast! In Dubai, I visited with Apparel Group, one of our fantastic sellers with hundreds of offline apparel stores in the region. They operate a Seller Flex node within their warehouse – a dedicated section of their building where they pick, pack, and ship orders from Amazon customers using our tools and software. It’s a clever way of offering thousands of popular fashion items with super fast Prime delivery to customers across UAE.
I really loved my visits to the Operations sites. At our fulfillment center BLR8 in Bangalore, I learned that about 5% of their employees are deaf or hard of hearing (and that across our entire India operations network, we employ 2,300 deaf or hard of hearing associates). I was inspired by the team’s commitment to continuous improvement, and their mantra that “no improvement idea is too small – or too big.” At our sortation center SBCZ, I saw an amazing miniature model of the site one of their leaders had built themselves to help employees understand how the building flows, which helps them work more efficiently. In Dubai, I enjoyed diving deep on how fulfillment center DXB5 and delivery station DDB7 work. Their progress in improving delivery speed and cost to serve were great to see. One of our PXT partners, Melina Sibonay Alvarado, Esq., put it well: our buildings in the Middle East have an “insatiable thirst to try new things.” I really felt this spirit during my visit.
I had a fantastic time visiting Bangalore and Dubai – thank you Akhil Saxena (He/His/Him), Abhinav Singh, Prashant Saran, Martin Rifai, Marta Anna Sioch, Mohamed Nabil, Matthew Kearns, and all the other Amazonians I had the pleasure of meeting!
