Amazon is spending $2.6 million to bolt eight new robotics workstations onto its sprawling JAX2 fulfillment center on Pecan Park Road, part of a permit the city of Jacksonville issued on August 21 for work that will turn stretches of manual conveyor into automated, robot-assisted picking lines.
The project, first reported by the Jacksonville Daily Record, will add a motorized driven roller bridge that merges into the facility's existing conveyor system, according to the outlet's Mathis Report. The bridge uses motorized rollers to move packages between mezzanines, building sections, or process areas, and the new setup will convert that portion of the operation from manual to automatic. The so-called ARSAW picking stations — Amazon Robotics Semi-Automated Workstations — bring inventory pods directly to employees through mobile drive units, eliminating the need for workers to walk long distances or climb ladders to retrieve items, per the same report.
Ohio Contractor Handles the Install
Intelligrated Systems LLC, based in Mason, Ohio, will handle the installation of the new robotics workstations, the Daily Record reports. The vendor's ownership picture shifted just weeks before the Jacksonville permit was filed: private equity firm American Industrial Partners finalized its acquisition of Honeywell's Intelligrated business unit in August, merging it with Trew and Transnorm to form a combined warehouse automation supplier, according to Robotics 24/7. Honeywell had originally acquired Intelligrated in 2016 for $1.5 billion before divesting its supply chain automation assets this year, per Robotics 24/7 and SCDigest's coverage of the deal.
JAX2 sits at 12900 Pecan Park Road in Northwest Jacksonville, close to Jacksonville International Airport, and is a massive operation by any measure: 857,470 square feet spread across a first floor and three mezzanines, part of roughly 2.3 million total square feet at the site, per the Daily Record's reporting. Amazon leases the facility from JDM Partners of Phoenix, which bought the property from USAA Real Estate Co. for $107.8 million in July 2020 — the largest commercial real estate transaction recorded in Northeast Florida that year, according to the Jacksonville Daily Record's 2021 ranking of top regional deals. USAA had originally acquired the 169-acre site in 2016 for $15 million before developing it.
Jacksonville's Amazon Footprint Keeps Growing
Amazon opened the Pecan Park center in September 2017, making JAX2 the flagship of the company's Jacksonville footprint, and followed it a month later with the AllianceFlorida at Cecil Commerce Center location in West Jacksonville, a 1.1 million-square-foot facility. Those first two Jacksonville fulfillment centers created 2,700 jobs and received $26.7 million in combined city and state incentives — but every subsequent Amazon project in the region, including 12 additional facilities and a planned 50,000-square-foot warehouse Amazon.com Services LLC will lease for an air cargo facility near the airport, has gone up without tax subsidies, per the Daily Record. Since those first two centers, Amazon has also opened another fulfillment center, two sortation centers, a heavy bulk freight center, and several delivery stations across the region.
The JAX2 retrofit fits a pattern playing out across Amazon's national network as the company converts traditional conveyor systems into semi-automated, drive-unit-supported workstations, trading manual merges for motorized roller bridges that cut down on physical strain for pickers. Amazon now operates more than 750,000 industrial mobile robots across its fulfillment network worldwide, the largest robotics fleet of its kind, according to Amazon News — a buildout the company accelerated after its 2012 acquisition of Kiva Systems for $775 million.
What the Upgrade Means for Jacksonville Workers
Amazon's Florida operations employees in customer fulfillment and logistics earned an average base hourly wage exceeding $23 as of July, with total compensation topping $30 an hour once healthcare and retirement benefits are factored in, Amazon News reports. The company says it has invested more than $55 billion across Florida since 2010, building a statewide workforce of more than 57,000 employees and supporting an estimated 80,000 indirect jobs. Separate research from Oxford Economics, cited by Amazon News, found that five years after an Amazon fulfillment center opens, surrounding communities see an average net addition of 10,000 local workers and 6,000 new small businesses.
It remains unclear whether the new robotics stations will change JAX2's baseline staffing levels or simply shift some workers' roles toward maintaining the automated systems, and Amazon has not said how quickly it plans to bring similar ARSAW upgrades to its other Northeast Florida sites, per the Daily Record. The retrofit is the latest sign of commercial activity clustering around the Pecan Park corridor, where a new Wawa opened this spring just east of the fulfillment center to serve warehouse workers and airport-area commuters.
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