Case Study: Amazon and Automation
Automation has been headlining the business news for many years. One company that has embraced automation is Amazon. Clearly, Amazon has determined that from the perspective of operations, automation is the future for the success of the business. The final case study is yet to be written as the future of automation for Amazon has not reached an end. As the automation is taking a foothold in operations, you will be analyzing and evaluating the impact of automation at Amazon to-date through various news articles and research papers from the last ten years only.
Automation means different things to different people. Pick a business area within Amazon that has started to introduce or has fully implemented some form of automation to answer the following: Questions:
1. What is the history of the business area selected at Amazon that has led up to automation?
2. From the articles you have found about your business area which has or will be automated at Amazon, how has this impacted or changed Amazon’s approach to the ten critical decisions of operations management? For each of the ten critical decisions of operations, perform an analysis of the decision pre-automation and post automation. What has been gained or potentially gained, and what has been lost or will be potentially lost. Support your argument with quotes and references from the newspaper articles or research papers.
3. From an operations management perspective only, is Amazon correct in their decision to move in the direction of automation for that area of business? Why or why not? Justify your answer using support from the textbook only.
Review the following case and answer the questions.Requirements:
• APA format – APA title page, APA in-text citation, APA reference page, and APA layout. More
than 3 unique APA errors result in an automatic grade of zero (0).
• Original writing required. Individual assignment.
• Minimum 2000 words, maximum 5000 words. Please include an introduction and conclusion. An abstract is not required. A TOC is not required.
• Please use appropriate headers to separate each question.
• Please follow the assessment rubrics found in the course syllabus (Section 8.0). A paper which has less than 2000 words will automatically receive a grade of zero (0). Word count does not include the title page or reference page.
• Use of pictures, tables and graphs is encouraged.
• Use simple business language in the paper.
• Ensure that the paper applies the correct operational theories and shows the relationship and application of the theory to the case. Ensure the correct operation definitions are used throughout the paper.
• Some research required. Please use at least 6 academic references – Textbook, Peer review,
journals or articles.