Amazon gives inside look of distribution warehouse in North Versailles

Walking into Amazon’s 140,000-square-foot distribution center in North Versailles on Thursday was a bit of a “full-circle” moment for Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. Austin Davis.

“When I was growing up, we had the Eastland Mall here, which was a leader in its time,” said Davis, a native of nearby McKeesport. “It declined, but we’ve now seen Amazon rebuild this site.”

Upon the ashes of the old brick-and-mortar mall off Route 30 has risen Amazon’s eighth operations location in the Pittsburgh area and one of 18 delivery centers in the state.

The e-commerce behemoth, notoriously guarded about its operations, gave a behind-the-scenes look at the North Versailles site that quietly opened in August. If you live in western Westmoreland County, chances are your Amazon packages will come through this facility, officials said.

About 250,000 packages roll through the site weekly.

Amazon orders in Western Pennsylvania typically start at one of the company’s locations west of Pittsburgh in Imperial, where there is a fulfillment center and robotic sorting facility.

Packages eventually make their way to North Versailles, where 200 employees sort them before loading them onto vans for about 300 drivers to deliver.

“This is the final step in the process,” said Amazon spokesman Sam Fisher of the delivery centers. “Nothing actually gets stored here.”

Large-scale deliveries arrive in the middle of the night, brought into the warehouse area on a massive conveyer-belt-style system. Then, Fisher said, a series of sortings take place in the early morning hours.

Inside the warehouse Thursday morning, employees collected groups of smaller packages into totes, which were then loaded, along with larger boxes, onto wheeled dollies and arranged in a staging area near the building’s truck bays. From there, they are loaded into delivery vans.

The system is coordinated through a series of scannable QR codes laid out on the floor, allowing employees to know exactly what should be where.

As Thursday’s tour group walked the warehouse floor, a line of employees brought out dollies full of totes to a line of vans waiting just outside. The facility, which Amazon calls DAE7, is less than five minutes from Route 30, giving drivers easy access to the Pennsylvania Turnpike and I-376.

Drivers largely are employed by outside delivery service companies, according to Amazon State and Local Public Policy Manager Dave Vitali.

“These businesses spring up anytime we build a new facility,” Vitali said. “Some are small and operate just out of here. Others have a couple hundred drivers and operate out of multiple facilities.”

Amazon provides back-end logistics support and leases vans to the delivery service providers.

The company also has built a 1 million-square-foot warehouse in New Stanton. Although Fisher said Amazon is not yet ready to disclose details about the facility, site developer Matt Virgin, with SunCap Property Group in Charlotte, N.C., previously has said it could create up to 600 jobs.

That warehouse is south of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and bounded by Westinghouse Drive and Glenn Fox Road. Other Amazon facilities have opened in Findlay, Ohio Township and Pittsburgh’s West End.

Monroeville native Chas Duboy is the North Versailles site manager. He started with the company as a part-time seasonal employee. He has been employed full time with Amazon for the past eight years.

“I do not have a four-year college degree, and that has not stopped me from advancing in my career here,” Duboy said.

Nearly half of the people in the company’s operations network were not working prior to starting at Amazon, Vitali said.

“Many were not in the labor force at all,” he said. “But they were able to interview, do the training and get started right away.”

Amazon also hosts a Career Choice program, offering more than $5,000 to employees seeking to further their education while working.

The company’s goal of regionalization has not just shortened delivery times but also empowered local small businesses, Vitali said.

“Pennsylvania has 13,000 small businesses which sell on Amazon.com,” he said. “Your neighbors are running sporting goods shops, art supply companies, businesses of all kinds, and those products are being delivered out of this building.”

The North Versailles location delivers to a roughly 35-square-mile area in Pittsburgh’s east suburbs.

“We want to try and replicate this type of success all over the commonwealth,” Davis said.