Case Study: Amway Clears the Air with IoT

Name of organization: Amway

Industry: Retail

Location: Ada, Michigan, USA

Opportunity or challenge encountered:  Amway, long famous for its direct-selling business line of nutrition, beauty, and home products, has moved into the digital realm. The company is now developing Internet-connected products, which began as a grassroots effort within the organization when it was in the process of enhancing its top-of-the-line air-treatment system. During this process, a cross-functional team identified an opportunity to enhance the user experience by adding Wi-Fi and Bluetooth communication, a recent case study relates.

Amway launched its first Internet-connected product—the Atmosphere Sky Air Treatment System—and plans to further explore what benefits IoT can bring to the enterprise. The system offers a clean air delivery rate (CADR) of about 300 at speed 5 and can clean the air passing through the unit in rooms up to 468 square feet in size. The product helps manage room air quality and control the unit wirelessly with its Atmosphere Connect mobile app, which enables customers to connect their units to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, use as a remote, check their filter status and indoor air quality.

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Meeting the challenge:  Amway worked with Amazon Web Services to implement its IoT platform in a serverless architecture using AWS IoT. It used other AWS services—including AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB—to implement additional features, including the ability to send commands to devices anywhere in the world and get a response; automatically update features on its devices; continuously collect data from devices and transform that data for later analysis or use in real time; onboard devices to the AWS IoT platform; and oversee user ID. The implementation includes a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to automate delivery of platform software updates. The pipeline picks up source code changes from a repository, builds and packages the application, and then pushes the new update through a series of stages, running integration tests to ensure all features are intact and backward-compatible in each stage.

Benefits:  With the IoT implementation, Amway is able to gather information about its products. This allows the company to better understand device performance and the needs of its end users, enabling greater innovation both for existing and future Amway products. The CI/CD process has allowed the company to be much more agile and has completely changed how it executes product development, the case study relates. Previously, it would take a week to get a production deployment completed and tested. This was reduced to minutes to hours. In addition, the company’s research and development group has real-time access to information on product performance. Amway is now able to gather data on motor speed, errors, voltages, and user interactions with the mobile app, helping to assess how well air-treatment units are operating in the field.

(Sources: Amazon Web Services, Amway)