Amway Drives Agility with Confluent

Amway, the world's largest direct-selling company with over $8 billion in annual sales, recognized the need to modernize its IT infrastructure to keep pace with the demands of its Independent Business Owners (IBOs) and customers across 100+ countries. The company's legacy, tightly-coupled architecture was hindering its ability to quickly deliver new capabilities and react to market changes. To address this challenge, Amway embarked on a digital transformation journey, leveraging Confluent and an event-driven architecture to set data in motion and empower teams with greater autonomy.

By decoupling systems and enabling real-time data flow, Amway has achieved significant improvements in agility and speed. Teams can now operate more independently, removing technology barriers and accelerating the delivery of new solutions. This new architecture proved invaluable during the concurrent launch of a major omnichannel commerce implementation and a multiyear ERP program. The event-driven approach allowed for seamless integration and a smooth transition, avoiding the complexities and delays that would have been encountered with the previous infrastructure.

Brian Hart, Vice President–IT Internal Business Solutions at Amway, emphasizes the transformative impact of Confluent: "Every new system that we connect with Confluent raises the value of the entire network exponentially... That’s our new mindset: extracting even more value from data that’s in motion." This shift towards real-time data processing has not only enhanced operational efficiency but also unlocked new opportunities for innovation and improved customer experiences. Amway is now better positioned to leverage its data assets and create value for its IBOs and customers worldwide.

Value Results:

• Millions of dollars in cost overruns avoided: Preserving the ERP program launch timeline saved millions in consulting and resource costs.

• Continuous quality assurance on critical IBO bonuses achieved: Real-time data processing enables continuous reconciliation and quality assurance of bonus calculations.

• Multiple transformational projects completed: The flexible event-driven architecture facilitated the successful completion of several key initiatives.

• Maximized the impact of IT teams: By offloading Kafka management to Confluent, the IT team can focus on strategic digital transformation initiatives.