Walmart Opens Fifth Next-Generation Fulfillment Center in Stockton
Walmart has opened its fifth next-generation fulfillment center in Stockton, California. The facility covers more than 900,000 square feet and is designed to cut the traditional 12-step fulfillment process to five steps. It is expected to create more than 1,000 jobs and is part of a broader effort to support next-day or two-day shipping for 95 percent of the U.S. population. Retailers that have scaled similar systems have also reported practical limits around equipment compatibility, reliability and energy costs once the buildings are running.
A Walmart spokesperson said in written comments to Warehouse Insider: “As customer expectations rise, we’re investing in state-of-the-art technology that helps our associates serve customers faster and more reliably. As these technologies scale, we continue to learn and make adjustments along the way.”
The same pattern of learning after deployment has appeared in prior Warehouse Insider coverage of dock and labor pressure. Austin Percifull, global key account manager at Körber Business Area Supply Chain, said: “From a labor and congestion standpoint, most dock pain comes from clustering, not total volume.”
A parallel point on the order of investment has appeared in prior Supply Chainer coverage of 3PL robotics decisions. Kevin Xu, vice president of strategic initiatives at ShipMonk, said: “At ShipMonk, we go for operational excellence before automation. It’s easy to justify ROI on inefficient operations. The path to having a sound ROI is far more important than what that ROI threshold itself is. Before we scale any automation capability across our network, we run pilots on low commitments. We test the equipment, stress the constraints, and see what the floor actually throws at it.”
A building that reduces process steps still leaves the remaining steps, the exceptions and the dock to be handled by people and by systems that must keep working after the opening. The operational question is how quickly the adjustments that follow scale change the labor plan, the maintenance schedule and the energy draw inside a facility that is already sized for West Coast volume.
