CASE STUDY AMWAY AARON HAND |
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Energy Drink Meets Skyrocketing Demand Through Digital Thread The PlantPAX control system from Rockwell Automation is enabling Amway to achieve greater operator efficiency, real-time troubleshooting, simplified data analysis, and increased manufacturing flexibility, among other improvements, through increased connectivity.
Amway was able to apply one control and information system across all processes to improve capacity and product quality, save energy and raw materials, and reduce process variations and human intervention.
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EPENDING ON YOUR AGE, you might remember Amway as a multi-level seller of cleaning supplies and other household goods. The company has expanded in several directions since its beginnings, including personal care products, cookware, vitamins and supplements, and more. One of Amway’s newest products is its XS brand of energy drinks. Marketed as a blast of energy without sugar or carbs, the drinks were originally developed by two Amway independent business owners (IBOs) in 2002. A year later, Amway became the exclusive distributor, and XS quickly became Amway’s No. 1 seller. Amway acquired the brand outright in 2015 and has since tripled the XS business. Since then, the market for functional beverage has continued to grow. The market was already on the rise, but that took off even further once the pandemic began. Lockdowns not only were a time to explore new foods and beverages, but also health was top of mind. Energy drinks make up the largest share of the U.S. functional beverage market at an estimated $18.6 billion, according to Euromonitor, and their popularity continues to escalate.
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PHOTO COURTESY OF ROCKWELL AUTOMATION
What this all meant to Amway and its plant in Ada, Mich., was that it was in desperate need of increased production capabilities. Amway had previously had the XS energy drink co-manufactured, but decided to bring production in-house to improve efficiency and cost structure. The company made a $15 million investment in its 100-acre campus in Ada—not only to provide the ability to boost production and enable further expansion in the future, but also to install the kinds of flexible systems that would accommodate a range of recipes. Formerly making liquid soaps not only for its own brands but co-manufacturing for several other big industry names as well, Amway was looking to get out of contract manufacturing, according to Rob Dargie, senior electrical engineer for Amway. The idea, then, was to use that plant for the new XS production. “We closed the liquids plant. It was one of the older plants, and we completely gutted that thing,” he says. “So it really was a greenfield plant then.”
Finding the digital thread Amway has been on a digital transformation journey for more than five years, Dargie notes. He began by overhauling the control network, which was dominated by a range of proprietary legacy networks that did not communicate well with one another. “Since then, we started building the Ethernet structure and then some bridge connections to those legacy communications,” he says. They began pulling more information from the systems, but it was challenging to seamlessly connect legacy IT systems and homegrown manufacturing systems to create the digital thread. They needed a control system that could bring it all together, enabling continuous data flow to improve and optimize operations. Amway turned to Rockwell Automation and its PlantPAx modern distributed control system (DCS)
| April 2022 | www.profoodworld.com
3/31/22 1:20 PM
