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KIVA only took 4 months from contract execution, until we started using it. The build-out in the other part of the building was about a year. The results that we've seen with KIVA is one of the significant things, that we sign a contract in February and our first order was in June, which was unheard of in the industry. The other thing that we've seen is that, in a really short period of time, not only were we able to fleet up relatively fast, our productivity over here is already twice what it is in the traditional part of the building. Our inventory accuracy, we think it is 100%. It's a little early to tell, until we do a lot of cycle counts. But we haven't seen any defects yet. And the other significant thing we've seen an improvement in is safety. We've had no incidents in the KIVA area, where we have anywhere from 2 to 3 incidents a week or a month in the traditional part of the building.

One of the really nice things about KIVA is that we're able to take the modular design of the pod and adapt it to our storage needs.

So one of our requirements was storing our apparel flat. So these bins were custom designed just for us, for our needs. And the nice thing about that is that I know, as I get into other categories like baseball bats, golf clubs, golf bags, that we can equally design a pod that will work for those storage needs, as well.

Our orders -- there's thirty-five thousand units a day -- are about one and a half units per order on average. About half our orders are single orders. About half our orders are multi- orders. So we have a sortation issue.

KIVA's a nice solution for that because it doesn't add complexity, it takes complexity out of the solution. So one of the big benefits is the workers are always on task, they're not standing around waiting for something to happen. So there's a queue of work in front of the worker at all time They're never really without something to do.

Now, because we have a traditional part of the building and we have our new KIVA section, the operators actually kinda [kinda=kind of] compete to see who can work in KIVA. They just love it over here. There's not as much walking, it's a lot quieter, it's a peaceful environment. It's really a good system to work with, not only from all of those aspects, but also ergonomically. We have about a fifty percent (50%) reduction in labour on the outbound side of the business. our defect rate over here is essentially zero percent (0%).

My name's Elizabeth Watkins. I've worked at Zappo's almost two years now. I started out working in the static shelving and it's an okay process. You take the shoes off the line, off the put-away line, load 'em ['em=them] all onto a cart, hope they don't fall off, walk 'em to a location, and hope there's room, and then you scan it and put it in the location.

Doing static shelving in the put-away there's an awful of of walking, and you spend all day, just walking about, looking for room to put away all your shoes and apparel and things. And at the end of the day your feet just get really tired.

I've been working in the KIVA robot zone for about three months now, maybe a little longer, and it's a really good process. I have been telling everybody about the KIVA robotic zone area here at Zappo's. It's a lot easier on your legs, it's quieter, it's faster: I can do twice the work using the robot system, in literally half the time.

I'm Felicia Thurman and I've been here since June of '08 (2008). I used to work in a different warehouse and we used carousels. Sometimes the carousels would mess up and we'd have to call maintenance, or we'd have to walk them, and it took a long time. In KIVA, you stay in one spot and they come to you, a lot faster than walking. So, I like the robots a lot better.

My name's James Foster and I've worked here about a year and a half. It's very easy in working with the robots, because they just bring it to you, and you got the lasers to show you where you're supposed to do everything. So it's just a lot of, uh, you know, grabbing, put it where it's supposed to and pack it, so it seems very efficient. The accuracy is very good. I haven't worked up here a whole lot with the robots, but the time that I have has been very good. I haven't noticed a lot of problems or anything.

With the conveyor process it's a little tougher because there's a lot of things that can go wrong, a lot of jams, and different things, and you know... The system's not sending work to where it's supposed to and I gotta (I gotta=I have to) fix all that, so it's a little more frustrating to work with. Over here with the robots it seems to be a lot better.

Quietness is more enjoyable, working with the robots because, you know you just... after a while you don't even realise, working around all the noise with the conveyors, how much it affects you. You know, you're yelling at people trying to get a message across. Over here, you just talk in a normal voice, um, you don't have to misunderstand what people are saying. It's, uh, more serene.

One of the really big benefits that we've seen with KIVA is the training cycle time. Whereas in the traditional part of the building, when we bring in either new people or seasonal help, it takes about 4 days to get 'em up on task, where they're on the top of the learning curve. In here it's less than half a day.

The storage density in this part of the building where we've installed KIVA is approximately 80% better than our square footage utilization in the traditional part of the building.

Another significant benefit that wasn't part of the economic analysis that we found later is that we're very much a service company. We want to get the order to the customer as quickly as possible, and our traditional part of the building it can go anywhere from 48 minutes at the fastest to about 3 and a half hours for a multi-order. Over here it's about 12 minutes. So that makes a huge impact on our service to the customer.

In our traditional part of the building, just to get it down to 48 minutes we had to spend extra capital to get to that point by improving the material handling beyond what's normally available off the shelf. Over here we were able to get it down to 12 minutes without any extra expense.

Another big benefit we know we'll get but haven't quantified yet is energy savings, so this part of the building still has some lights on, not very many, as opposed to the other part of the building, but we're going to turn these off and only have the area lit where the people are. Another big advantage is the original 416,000 square feet of the building we just climate controlled the entire thing for human comfort,and over here all we have to do is spot-cool the area. So the energy savings over here is enormous. plus I have 23.000 feet of conveyor that's running 24/7 over there with 600 motors that are constantly turning and I don't have that over here. Another great benefit that we have is that as the company has grown we're getting into a lot more categories, and we're getting into jewelry and watches and things like that that are highly pilferable, and the really nice benefit to KEVA is that you get natural security because everywhere where the pods are and the robots are it's a personnel exclusion area so there shouldn't ever be a person in there, the only opportunity there would be for shrinkage is as the order comes to the picker. So our experience with KEVA during the whole implementation, contract negotiations, everything have been more of a partner than of an adversarial vendor. So it's been a fantastic experience from a partnership standpoint. I feel that the people at KEVA are part of our company, are part of our family, and not part of the other side of the fence. As ZAPPOS continues to grow, we think KEVA's going to be the solution that we're going to use for a long time. We're already talking about the next phase of it later this year and it'll continue to grow. As we build a new building I suspect that it'll be 100% KEVA with no conveyors.