AMWAY.COM

Amway Accelerates U.S.
Digital Transformation
with Confluent

With annual sales of more than $8 billion, Amway is the world’s largest direct sellingcompany. The company’s nutrition, beauty, personal care, and home products are sold in
more than 100 countries through Amway Independent Business Owners (IBOs) aroundthe world.
To ensure that IBOs always have the information and tools they need to drive sales,
Headquarters
Michigan, United States
Industry
RetailChallenge
Replace a tightly coupled legacy IT
architecture that slowed the deliveryof new capabilities to customers andindependent business owners
Solution
Use Confluent and an event-driven
architecture to set data in motion andenable teams to work with greater
independence
Results• Time-to-market estimates halved• Mainframe and message queue costestimates cut• De-risked adoption of a newtechnology paradigm

Amway IT and business solutions teams place a high priority on modernizing their digital
footprint and moving fast to deliver needed solutions on tight schedules. The company’slegacy IT architecture, however, was not well aligned with this priority. “The need to react
quickly to changes that are happening is ever present in our organization. To go fast, weneed to eliminate external dependencies for our teams, because the more dependencies
they have the more opportunity there is for them to be stopped or stuck in a wait state,”says Brian Hart, Vice President–IT Internal Business Solutions at Amway. “Our legacy
architecture—with its tight coupling and middleware—was one of those dependencies thatslowed us down.”

With Confluent, we have a much more flexible architecturethat makes it possible for our teams to operate more
independently, and that ultimately leads to greater speed
across the organization. We’re removing technology barriers
and getting data to the teams that need it faster, andthat’s enabling us to take advantage of new opportunities
and implement new experiences that will help our IBOs
and customers.
– Brian Hart, Amway

Amway launched a modernization initiative, powered in part by data in motion withConfluent, that is enabling teams to deliver faster and with greater autonomy. “WithConfluent, we have a much more flexible architecture that makes it possible for our teams
to operate more independently, and that ultimately leads to greater speed across theorganization,” says Hart. “We’re removing technology barriers and getting data to theteams that need it faster, and that’s enabling us to take advantage of new opportunities
and implement new experiences that will help our IBOs and customers.”©2021 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io1

AMWAY.COM

The new architecture has already paid dividends at Amway on an initiative that combined two large-scale efforts running in parallel: a majoromnichannel commerce implementation and a multiyear ERP program. “We were able to launch two massive projects within months of one
another because of the event-driven architecture that we had established with Confluent,” says Jeff Renz, Director of IT Solution Development
at Amway. “In the past, that would have been impossible because we would have had to uncouple and recouple the systems involved. In thiscase, we had the data from our legacy middleware systems being published to Kafka topics, so the producers and consumers were independent.
That made the switch to go live relatively simple—in fact, it was a non-event.”

Business ResultsTechnical Solution• Millions of dollars in cost overruns avoided. “Our ability toThe Amway event streaming journey started with pilot projects inpreserve the timing of our ERP program launch saved millions ofa single market: North America. “It started with a recognition thatdollars in consulting and resources that would have been needed

we needed a different way to connect systems beyond the tightly

to keep our old system going,” says Beth Zuke, North America

coupled methods we were using,” says Hart. “We wanted to give

Technology Director at Amway. “We would never have been ableteams that were operating those systems complete control overto keep that timing if we did not have the new, flexible event-driven

the data flowing between them, so we started on a small scalearchitecture enabled by Confluent.”• Continuous quality assurance on critical IBO bonuses achieved.
“For our IBOs, the calculation of sales bonuses is critically important. In the past, we’d run an hours-long batch process for that,with some streaming projects in one market of the many that weoperate in. Although it was on a small scale, the data we weremoving—customer data and order data—was vital to our company.
In addition to ensuring orders are fulfilled, the data is also used toand if any issues arose, we’d always catch them, but only at thecalculate IBO bonuses, which is critically important.”end of the process,” says Renz. “With Confluent, the data now

After beginning these pilot projects with open source Apache Kafka®,traverses our ecosystem in real time, so we have continuous

the Amway team made the decision to bring in Confluent in prepa-reconciliation and continuous quality assurance on key processes.”ration for production use cases. “We got going with open source• Multiple transformational projects completed. “We’ve completed
several transformational programs over the last year, andKafka, and once we started to see the benefits of an event-driven
architecture, we wanted to ensure we had enterprise support as wewe’ve relied on our relationship with Confluent in designing themoved forward—that’s when we engaged Confluent,” says Renz.

solutions,” says Zuke. “Our teams have been very complimentary

The ERP and omnichannel commerce programs that Amway recentlyof the Confluent team, whose guidance played a big part in thecompleted illustrate the additional benefits that the company is

success of those programs.”

seeing now that the company has progressed further in its data

• Maximized the impact of IT teams. “Our teams are finite; wedon’t have the bandwidth to support a self-managed environment,” says Renz. “We know the Confluent engineers live andbreathe Kafka all day, every day. We are confident that they aretaking care of our environment, so our teams can focus on ourstreaming journey. “Not only has Confluent and the event-driven
architecture helped us to go faster, they have also helped us froma performance perspective,” says Zuke. “Some of the internal systems that had been slowing monthly operations are now insulated
or modernized, and that’s been a significant benefit to us as well.“digital transformation.”

Every new system that we connect with Confluent raises the value of the entire
network exponentially. Not only can our teams move faster because our systems
are decoupled, but we’re also getting more value out of our data because it’smoving, not waiting in a database to be processed in batch. That’s our new mindset:
extracting even more value from data that’s in motion.”– Brian Hart, Amway©2021 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io2

AMWAY.COM

Amway’s cloud strategy is also playing a role in not only enabling
growth but driving it. “In several cases, the cloud enabled us to scale
incredibly quickly, much faster than when we had to buy physicalequipment and set it up in a data center,” says Hart. “By combiningthat scalability with our event-driven architecture, we can rapidly
stand up to new experiences—for example new mobile experiences—and plug them into the data mesh we’re building with Confluent.”
The team will use capabilities such as ksqlDB to accelerate streaming app development and connectors to easily integrate data fromlegacy mainframes to modern systems.
Looking ahead, Hart expects data streaming to deliver even greater
value due to the network effect. “We are also able to more easily
onboard new data sources and third-party systems, which wasn’t
necessarily the case before. Every new system that we connect withConfluent raises the value of the entire network exponentially,” hesays. “Not only can our teams move faster because our systems
are decoupled, but we’re also getting more value out of our data
because it’s moving, not waiting in a database to be processed inbatch. That’s our new mindset: extracting even more value fromdata that’s in motion.”

Learn More About Amway
www.amway.com©2021 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io3