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Date Published: 06/07/2022

ARCHIVED - Amazon centre in Corvera continues its expansion

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The company is hiring more employees in an aggressive growth strategy less than a year after opening, attempting to change their image of poor working conditions

<span style='color:#780948'>ARCHIVED</span> - Amazon centre in Corvera continues its expansion

Nine months after the official inauguration of the automated Amazon centre in Corvera, Murcia, the company continues to grow, recruit employees and expand its base in the Region.

On its job portal and in temporary employment companies, there is no end to the number of vacancies being advertised for workers in Corvera’s Amazon centre. The company is also looking for a maintenance manager, as can be seen in its LinkedIn profile, as well as a warehouse hand in an offer published by Manpower.

The site changed hands in February when the London-based Roebuck Asset Management company sold the centre to Savills Investment Management (Savills IM) for 95 million euros.

With a surface area of 160,000 square metres, the equivalent of 27 football pitches, the Corvera plant processes 550,000 products every day and stores 25 million products. The warehouse, one of only 50 in the world, is fully robotised and has the latest operating technologies.

Now, their intention is to reach 1,200 employees in the next two years, though as of December there were only around 400 workers there.

Amazon notoriously came under fire last year for its horrendous working conditions in some of its global logistics and processing centres, which forced employees to urinate into bottles at their workspace because they weren’t allowed bathroom breaks, among other issues.

According to the selfsame Amazon, they are not only helping themselves in Murcia but are also benefitting Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises in the local area. Three hundred SMEs were already working in conjunction with the Amazon centre back in 2020, and the sales derived from their products totalled 15 million euros, explained Fred Pattje, director of Amazon Customer Fullfilment for France, Italy and Spain.

A look inside the Amazon centre in Corvera: how does it work?

All the steps taken at Amazon are mapped out and controlled. When a parcel arrives at the centre, it first passes through a scanner that identifies and labels it, and from there, it is moved on conveyor belts to the storage floors, where each product is placed on shelves by human employees.

Advanced technologies in centres equipped with Amazon Robotics technology, such as the one in Murcia, aim to support safer ways of working for everyone in the centre. Examples of these technologies include mobile drive units and four-sided yellow shelving towers, which assist employees by bringing items to them, supposedly reducing the amount of travel around the centre but effectively locking the employees into their workspace. The Murcia logistics centre has more than 54,000 racks and 2,895 mobile units, which can lift up to 1,500 kilograms.

Robotic palletisers and depalletisers have been installed at this logistics centre in Corvera with the aim of improving the experience and well-being of employees by eliminating the need to carry heavy loads, while sorting robots are used to automate repetitive tasks such as lifting, stacking, moving and placing packages, allowing employees to focus on the kind of work that robots cannot do.

The shelves have a mobile system that moves to the worker, and the product is placed on it randomly, as a camera system retains its location. While on the one hand this automation does help the worker, it also eliminates the need for the company to employ so many people, which puts in question to what extent they will be able to or need to hire 1,200 people by 2024.

Images: Archive

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