Page 39 - HW Dec-Jan 2023

Amazon aims to make more from less
Armed with a store model based on its successes in the UK and Ireland, but with product ranges adapted to the French market, Kingfisher’s jewel in the crown Screwfix joined fellow UK merchants Toolstation and Howdens in France at the end of October.
Screwfix’s first two store openings follow the successful launch of its online business Screwfix.fr in April 2021, from which Screwfix says it has seen “a positive response” from its customers, with “strong traffic and conversion rates and growing brand awareness across the country.”
The first Screwfix France store opened in Wattrelos in Lille, in the top north eastern corner of the country, and there are plans for three to four more stores
to open by the end of January 2023, all in the same Hauts-de-France region and with “many more” planned for the rest of 2023.
Supporting these stores, Screwfix’s French distribution centre located in Nanteuil-le-Haudouin (some 50km or so from Paris), has been operating since May last year.
Each Screwfix France store will offer around 10,000 products aimed at the trade with 5,000 more products available online and click & collect from store promised in as little as 10 minutes.
Screwfix may be last in but could it still be best dressed? After all, it has seen rapid expansion in the UK and Ireland over the past decade, growing from
215 stores and £51 million in sales in 2011/2012 to 842 stores today, with £2.3 billion in sales in 2021/2022.
www.screwfix.fr
AMAZON IS STILL working hard at maximising returns from its substantial investment in warehouse and distribution.
Amazon’s robotics drive continues –
With unfortunate timing, seeing Amazon is cutting back on staff and some of its newer bricks & mortar store experiments, comes the reveal of a new automation initiative in its warehouses.
Back to automation and distribution and Sparrow, which is the friendly moniker for Amazon’s new intelligent robotic system.
Sparrow will take on repetitive tasks, enabling employees to “focus their time and energy on other things, while also advancing safety.”
No small feat, Sparrow is the first robotic system in Amazon warehouses that
can detect, select, and handle any of the millions of individual products in Amazon’s inventory.
Designed to assist human employees
and streamline the fulfilment process by moving individual products before they are packaged (no easy task for an automaton), Sparrow will moves totes to employees who select inventory to be packaged.
Once the items are boxed up, Amazon’s existing robotic arms – Robin and Cardinal – then redirect packages to where they’re needed in the warehouse pre-delivery.
Interesting in the light of its cutting back of employees that Amazon is at pains to emphasise that the design and deployment of robotics and technology across its operations has created “over 700 new categories of jobs” and that “these new types
of roles, which employ tens of thousands
of people across Amazon, help tangibly demonstrate the positive impact technology and robotics can have for our employees and for our workplace.”
Making more of warehouses – Having slowed warehouse openings to rein in costs, in September Amazon introduced a new service to both make more of its warehouse network and help its sellers store bulk inventory and tackle supply-chain issues.
The new service, called Amazon Warehousing & Distribution (AWD), is available for sellers outsourcing order fulfilment to the company.
A pay-as-you-go service, sellers can
store and distribute their inventory within Amazon’s fulfilment network and, next year, Amazon will expand AWD to off-Amazon destinations as well.
Sellers using AWD can consolidate their global inventory, which they can then view and manage on Seller Central, simplifying their operations with one pool of inventory.
In 2023, sellers will also be able to use AWD to send their inventory to any location, including to wholesale customers or brick-and-mortar stores.
www.amazon.com
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DECEMBER 2022/JANUARY 2023 | NZHJ 37