On a mission to meet its promise of same-day and next-day delivery, Amazon has rapidly expanded its network of fulfillment and delivery centers across the U.S.—including multiple locations in Michigan. One of the most advanced of these is Amazon’s Project Mercury, an 855,000-square-foot facility on Ecorse Road in Romulus, where Motor City Electric Co. (MCE) and its affiliates provided full electrical contracting services.
Scope of Work
The MCE team delivered electrical installations for both incoming and branch power, site and interior lighting, generators, fire alarms, and access control systems. In addition to the central warehouse, our scope included the loading docks, kitchen, cafeteria, and offices, all designed to support Amazon’s high-efficiency operations.
Amazon
Built for Speed and Scale
To help meet the fast-paced construction schedule, MCE’s Prefabrication Department assembled lighting fixture feeds, disconnect racks, and cord drops offsite, delivering ready-to-install assemblies directly to the jobsite. Roughly the length of 14 football fields, Amazon Romulus opened in July 2018, bringing more than 1,500 jobs to the area.
Powering a Robotic Workforce
Inside, the fulfillment center is a model of automated logistics. The facility is filled with advanced conveyors, sensors, and mobile robots, built by Amazon Robotics, formerly Kiva Systems.
Here, the shelves come to the workers. Items arrive in bright yellow tubs and are scanned, sorted, and stored in tall mobile shelving pods. Once filled, the pods are whisked away by small orange robots that glide across the warehouse floor, guided by barcode stickers and onboard sensors. These bots can lift up to 1,000 pounds, travel at 256 feet per minute, and recharge themselves every hour in just five minutes. Larger units carry full pallets and loads up to 3,000 pounds.
Engineered for Efficiency
When a customer places an order, Amazon’s system pinpoints the item’s location and dispatches the nearest robot. In seconds, the bot retrieves the shelf and delivers it to a human operator for picking and packing. Meanwhile, a massive conveyor network, stretching more than 10 miles, moves items through the facility with remarkable speed and accuracy.
With Project Mercury, MCE helped deliver a facility that’s not only technologically advanced, but engineered for the future of fulfillment.
