Based on the article above, explain how inventory management (inventory) can provide competitive advantage for Amazon.com!

GLOBAL COMPANY PROFILE Amazon.com Inventory Management Provides Competitive Advantage at Amazon.com hen Jeff Bezos opened his revolutionary business in 1995, Amazon.com was intended to be a "virtuar retailerno inventory, no warehouses, no overhead-just a bunch of computers taking orders for books and authorizing others to fill them. Things clearly didn't work out that way. Now, Amazon stocks millions of items of inventory, amid hundreds of thousands of bins on shelves in over 150 warehouses around the world. Additionally, Amazon's Marilyn Mono Get Journal Berany 1. You order three items, and a computer in Seattle takes charge. A computer assigns your ordera book a game, and a digital camera to one of Amazon's massive U.S. distribution centers. 2. The "flow meister at the distribution center receives your order. She determines which workers go where to fill your order. 3. Amazon's current system doubles the picking speed of manual operators and drops the error rate to nearly zero. Bal Cawhip USA Newcom 4. Your items are put into crates on moving belts. Each item goes into a large yellow crate that contains many customers' orders. When full, the crates ride a series of conveyor belts that wind more than 10 miles through the plantat a constant speed of 2.9 feet per second. The bar code on each item is scanned 15 times. by machines and by many of the 600 workers. The goal is to reduce errors to zero-retums are very expensive. 5. All three items converge in a chute and then inside a box. All the crates arrive at a central point where bar codes are matched with order numbers to determine who gets what. Your three items end up in a 3-foot-wide chute one of several thousand and are placed into a comugated box with a new bar code that identifies your order. Picking is sequenced to reduce operator travel 6. Any gifts you've chosen are wrapped by hand. Amazon trains an elite group of gift wrappers, each of whom processes 30 packages an hour. HET software is so good that Amazon sells its order taking processing, and billing expertise to others. It is estimated that 200 million items are now avail- able via the Amazon Web Site Bezos expects the customer experience at Amazon to and management. The time to receive, process, and position be one that yields the lowest price, the fastest delivery, and the stock in storage and to the accurately "pull" and pack an error-free order fulfillment process so no other contact with age an order requires a labor investment of less than 3 min- Amazon is necessary. Exchanges and returns are very expensive utes. And 70% of these orders are multiproduct orders. This Managing this massive inventory precisely is the key for underlines the high benchmark that Amazon has achieved. Amazon to be the world-class leader in warehouse automation This is world-class performance. When you place an order with Amazon .com, you are doing business with a company that obtains competitive advantage through inventory management This Giobal Company Profile shows how Amazon does it PHIE KUEWING SOY 7. The box is packed, taped, weighed, and labeled before leaving the warehouse in a truck. A typical plant is designed to ship as many as 200,000 pieces a day. About 60% of orders are shipped via the U.S. Postal Service; nearly everything else goes through United Parcel Service 8. Your order arrives at your doorstep. In 1 or 2 days, your order is delivered