Amway bolsters financial business system productivity and elevates global service levels

Summary

Together with Amway we kept the company ahead of the curve through their cloud migration. To meet their commitment to providing the highest caliber of service and still be able to take on more strategic growth-oriented projects, Amway’s Finance Center of Excellence team needed an efficient way to augment their capabilities. By partnering with us they were able to accelerate moving their enterprise software implementations off-site, allowing them to get ahead of strategic project deadlines, while still maintaining 24/7 service levels.

Supporting a global organization

Amway employs a large staff to manage the company’s massive IT environment. ‘Given the complexity of Amway’s business and the many entities we support, our IT organization has a tremendous responsibility,’ said Aamir Ismail, Manager of Finance Information Support at Amway. ‘We’re essentially managing the Financial Business System environments for 65 affiliates at once, each with different needs. So, when there was a more complex project, like a cloud migration, that needed attention, our team would have to juggle priorities and stretch the staff thin to accommodate it.

Compounding the need for more resources was the demand for specific types of expertise. Amway’s Finance department utilizes a wide range of systems and enterprise applications for all its affiliate entities.

Amway has thousands of employees around the world that depend on these systems to perform critical work — they cannot afford for our systems to be down or not working properly,’ Ismail commented. ‘Take, for example, our financial management software implementation. We have more than 900 users globally, and they need that system to be operational and running at peak performance around the clock.’

To meet their commitment to providing the highest caliber of service and still be able to take on more strategic growth-oriented projects, the Finance COE team needed an efficient way to augment their capabilities, allowing them to cover daily activities such as bug fixes and upgrades, while freeing existing staff to focus on more value-add initiatives.

Building a steadfast partnership

That's when Amway Finance turned to NTT Managed Services. Of course, the service provider's reputation, successful track record and financial stability were all important factors in Amway's decision, but that was just the beginning.

'We were on a tight timeline to begin with, and NTT delivered. They completed the migration flawlessly in a matter of weeks,' Ismail said. They had the exact mix of experience we were looking for. 'And because they're leaders in the industry, they have early access to information and resources that aren't readily available to the public. For example, they found out a patch was being issued and reached out to us to install it before the software vendor made it available to the broader community. Right away, the combined team got to work, starting with the migration of Amway's financial management implementation to the cloud.

Accelerating their IT transformation

Since partnering with us, the Amway Finance organization has gained exactly what they had hoped: productivity. By moving their enterprise software implementations off-site to their new partner, Amway’s now getting ahead of strategic project deadlines, while still maintaining 24/7 service levels. In fact, Amway Finance has not experienced a system outage since moving to us.

Amway’s also enjoying new capabilities through their partnership that they didn’t have on their own. 'We didn’t have disaster recovery when we did everything in-house, but we do now with NTT,’ Ismail said. ‘It’s amazing. They can go beyond anything we could have done ourselves. They even have a backup for a backup for a backup!'

And while features and functionality are important, what’s been most important to Ismail and the larger organization is the fact that we operate as an extension of the team, just as they had hoped. Amway has a dedicated NTT Managed Services team that is fully up to speed on every aspect of global reporting and knows exactly what needs to be done.

‘We’re in constant contact with our account manager. They’re incredibly proactive, and they respond to our needs immediately. Anytime we ask for something, the team is ready,’ Ismail added.