Since Amazon.com’s founding in 1994 it has gone from a company that sold books out of a garage to a multinational e-commerce juggernaut that now boast over $61 Billion dollars in revenue. Founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, and launched in 1995 Amazon.com began as an online bookstore that quickly diversified to an array of different products such as toys, VHS, music etc. This diversification has helped Amazon grow in the past two decades. When the dot-com bubble burst in the late 90’s investors were a bit skeptical in whether their business model would work. The company ended up proving skeptics wrong making their first annual profit in 2003 and since then have never looked back. The following chart shows the success and value of Amazons stock in the past five years:
A small part of this company’s success is the Make-On- Demand Department. There are six Make-On-Demands in the world including one in Lexington, Kentucky which will be described in the following document. MOD is unique in the sense that it is not like other departments in the warehouse because it actually deals with manufacturing. This department in particular deals with the making of books, DVD’s and CD’s; but this document will solely focus on the production of books from the beginning of production until they get out of the department and on the warehouse floor.
The key factor with MOD is that it is the epitome of Just-In-Time inventory. This is great in a sense because we never have inventory sitting around that is costing us money. Customers can place their order and we will make the book in particular that they wanted and ship it out in the range of about a couple of hours. It is because of this type of system that MOD has been able to pick up business for the last several years. They have gone from having backlogs of 6000 in given day back in 2011 to backlogs over 30,000 in 2013. In the last year alone MOD has grown 60 percent and has had constant growth since its
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