Amazon promotes logistics head to CFO of AWS

Amazon is staying within the organization to fill two roles.

The c-commerce giant is promoting John Felton, senior VP of worldwide operations, to a new role of senior VP and CFO of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit, which is typically Amazon’s top profit driver. He will report to Brian Olsavsky, senior VP and CFO of Amazon.

Most recently, Felton led the effort to regionalize Amazon’s U.S. network, with the retailer saying that delivery speeds for customers have improved and cost to serve has been reduced. Felton has spent 12 years at Amazon, with six years in finance and six years in operations.

With Felton’s transition, Udit Madan will take over leading Amazon worldwide operations. Madan has spent more than 15 years at Amazon, most recently as VP of transportation.

"Please join me in congratulating John and Udit on their new roles,” Doug Herrington, CEO, worldwide Amazon stores, said in a corporate blog post. “I have loved spending time in many of our operations sites over the past 18 months and am energized by the work happening across operations and the entire stores organization. I am incredibly excited about what 2024 has in store for our team and the continued improvements in customer experience that we will deliver together."

"The plan and goals we have will continue to improve safety, speed, cost, and quality,” Felton said in the blog post. “2023 highlighted so many new opportunities for us. I am particularly excited for the next set of innovations around inventory placement, ultra-fast delivery, and automation. The future is very bright."

Amazon Web Services to offer new supply chain capabilities in 2024

Felton is taking over as CFO of AWS as the division plans to launch several supply chain-related hosted cloud features during 2024. Highlights include:

• AWS Supply Chain Supply Planning uses the demand forecasts created by AWS Supply Chain Demand Planning, along with data about product, facility, bill of materials (BOM) and inventory. 
• AWS Supply Chain N-Tier Visibility extends users’ visibility and insights to multiple tiers of external trading partners. Users can then automate communication and improve their own forecasts. 
• AWS Supply Chain Sustainability enables sustainability professionals to request, collect, and export artifacts such as product life cycle assessments, certificates on product safety, or reports on hazardous substances used, at any point in the supply chain. 
• Amazon Q in AWS Supply Chain is a generative AI assistant powered by Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed generative AI service from AWS. that provides a natural language interface in the AWS Supply Chain application so that customers can query data within the AWS Supply Chain Data Lake, and receive intelligent answers to “what?” and “why?” and “what if?” questions.