Provenance: Building Batch-Level Compliance for Amazon Pharmacy

Swati took on the Provenance feature within Amazon's Smart Connect platform at a point where pharmaceutical inventory was tracked at the SKU level, with no visibility into which batch had been dispatched against which order. The compliance exposure was significant: if a medicine recall was issued, Amazon had no way to identify which customers had received the affected batch.

Before writing a PRD, she spent about a week in one of Amazon's warehouses. She followed the full inbounding and invoicing process, observed how batch-level information was recorded in physical registers, and mapped the offline SOP for handling expired batches, including the cadence and logic of expiry clear-outs. The goal was to understand what full compliance looked like in offline retail before designing the online equivalent.

From that fieldwork, she built the user stories and PRD for Provenance. The system captured batch number, MRP, and expiry date at the point of inbounding, stored that information against each SKU, and automated the removal of expired batches from sellable inventory. It also generated the DNC copy required for every pharmaceutical order, which had previously been filled in manually for each transaction.

The feature was built within Smart Connect and required close coordination with sellers and warehouse operations to validate that the system matched real-world pharmacy practice.