The man in charge of Amazon’s enormous Fife fulfilment centre has vowed to continually improve working conditions for staff on site.
General manager Paul Ashraf also said the online retail giant was committed to growing its business in Fife, where it now has a permanent workforce of more than 1,500 staff.
The centre – which is known as EDI4 – is the largest Amazon facility in the UK.
It has vast warehousing and packing halls holding tens of millions of pounds worth of inventory, it is the main service centre for Kindle and it also handles the bulk of customer returns for the UK.
Despite the huge volume of orders being processed on a daily basis, the site still has the capacity to grow.
“EDI4 is a fundamentally important part of the fulfilment centre infrastructure for the UK,” Mr Ashraf said.
“We have no plans to change that.
“Each year we evaluate the business based on growth and decide where we need additional people.
“Since the turn of this year we have an additional 3,5000 associates across the UK.”
A large proportion of those new jobs were added at Dunfermline.
“We had the fantastic opportunity earlier this year to convert hundreds of people from temporary status to permanent status,” Mr Ashraf said.
“That was a huge, huge recognition of those associates and all of their hard work. We had an overwhelming desire from the people to join us.”
Amazon has faced criticism in the past over working conditions at its centres and its pay policy.
The company told The Courier that the majority of fulfilment centre employees earned a minimum of £8.25 per hour – more than £1 ahead of the National Living Wage – and had received stock options worth more than £1,000 annually over the last five years.
“Over the summer, we are focusing on some really important, associate-centred projects,” Mr Ashraf said.
“We are going to look to develop the break-out rooms (one staff area has already been given a T in the Park-themed makeover) and we are going to be investing money in an employee engagement plan to ensure we listen to staff and to ensure their experience is even better.”
He added: “I have been in the business for three-and-a-half years and we get our leadership teams to spend an inordinate amount of time on the associate experience and all of the detailed planning for Prime and for peak.”
The Courier’s visit to the Dunfermline facility came in the wake of Amazon Prime Day – the single largest 24 hours of trading in the company’s history.
Among the highlights across the global business was the sale of more than 90,000 televisions, two million toys and a million pairs of shoes.
The Fife facility geared up for the Prime challenge by handing out free t-shirts to staff and delivering ice poles to workers as they took a break from fulfilling the tens of thousands of orders that flowed in.
At the height of the Prime operation, a total of eight packing lines manned by around 200 operators were in constant operation at the Fife facility.
Mr Ashraf said the Prime volumes were exceptional and required significant planning to ensure they could be handled efficiently.
The Christmas peak period is the next major challenge on the horizon and Mr Ashraf said work began months ago to ensure the 2016 festive season went without a hitch.
Among the biggest sellers over the 2015 Christmas period was adult colouring books – a worldwide phenomenon spearheaded by Johanna Basford, a graduate of Dundee’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.
Mr Ashraf, who previously led Amazon’s other major Scottish site at Gourock before being promoted to his current job in February, said the peak period was a major logistical challenge where new job levels had to be matched against forecast demand.
“We start planning for peak in January,” he said.
“In January, February and March we will look at how we have entered the calendar year and the growth of the business.
“As we are set to go into Q3 (the third quarter of the year), then we start to really look at how many people we need to help us for Q4.”