Operations Management at Amazon Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 2

Operations Management at Amazon - Essay Example The preceding discussion confirms the findings in the literature relating to the new and complex challenges facing e-commerce plays like Amazon, especially with regard to how its radically different strategy of optimizing operations efficiencies to execute a volume strategy in the online retail space needs new ways of managing operations. These new ways need to impute the opportunities provided by new technologies, but at the same time be mindful of the pitfalls of relying on old ways of thinking in order to solve problems that are unique to Amazon (Rao 2011; Karmakar and Apte 2007). One can see that aspects of process design, are intertwined with inventory management concerns. This is the case for inventory management considerations for digital content, for example, as those relate to the relative ease of handling virtual inventory on the one hand and the opposing difficulty and complexity of managing physical inventories. Here aspects of operations relate to optimizing warehouses a nd processes for managing inventories from the supplier to the warehouses, as well as those aspects of inventory management relating to the handling of physical goods at the fulfillment centers at Amazon (Rao 2014). A recommendation is to continue to use Amazon Prime as the benchmark for efficiency and success of the execution of the inventory management processes at Amazon, owing to the high bar it has set for orders fulfillment and the cost of fulfilling orders of physical goods (Graham 2013; Onetto 2014).