Founded in 1959, Amway has grown to be one of the world’s largest direct selling businesses, expanding from home products to become a global leader in health and beauty products.
Amway’s vision and values include partnership, integrity, and achievement—values they saw mirrored in their work with Flexagon.
Amway at a Crossroads
Amway had been using HP’s PPM (previously Kintana) as a deployment tool for about nine years when they decided in 2016 to look elsewhere. They were on a version of PPM that would not support their upcoming move to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2. Upgrading to a newer version of PPM would be time consuming, costly, and require extensive internal and external resources. Additionally, Amway needed to get everyone in their Development and Solutions team onto the same platform, which would mean additional licenses and additional cost.
Amway needed to decide whether they would continue using PPM or look elsewhere. They needed a tool that could handle E-Business suite deployments, integrate well with JIRA, and set them up for an enterprise-wide DevOps strategy; a difficult task to be sure.
The Solution: FlexDeploy
Amway chose FlexDeploy, a market-leading DevOps and Release Automation platform, to help meet their needs.
FlexDeploy modernizes how companies manage the software delivery lifecycle, from provisioning through release. FlexDeploy users can deliver higher quality software faster, and with less cost and risk, thanks to the controls, automation, and visibility that is inherent with an integrated and extensive solution. It is the only integrated solution on the market, eliminating the tool sprawl many companies see with other Release Automation solutions. “With FlexDeploy,” said Flexagon President Dan Goerdt, “companies need only one tool to anchor their automation platform, significantly cutting initial implementation time and cost, and providing an easier-to-manage and more cost-effective solution over time.”
FlexDeploy Meets and Exceeds Amway’s Needs
After evaluating the options in the marketplace, Amway selected FlexDeploy. There was, however, one small problem; FlexDeploy didn’t have a GA version of E-Business Suite at the time.
Amway decided to join Flexagon for a beta program of FlexDeploy’s EBS support, and jumped right in on the front end. They met with Flexagon’s development team on requirements, saw the early work that was being done and tested early code releases. The success throughout the beta program convinced Amway’s leadership that FlexDeploy was the right option.
Once Amway decided to move forward with FlexDeploy, implementation only took three weeks. They ended up using FlexDeploy’s REST APIs to customize the JIRA plugin to meet the needs of their change management process.
“The biggest differentiators,” explains Jerry Sullivan, Amway Oracle EBS Environment Manager, “were the power and extensibility of FlexDeploy and how easy the Flexagon team was to work with. They responded quickly to requirements, and were open with us when they either couldn’t or chose not to meet certain requirements.”
After the beta program, the transition to using FlexDeploy was smooth. The implementation supports 28 EBS instances, and Amway has seen an improvement in what they can deploy since going to FlexDeploy. By supporting more object types than PPM, FlexDeploy eliminated manual processes.
“With FlexDeploy, we have achieved the cost savings we were looking for, and it’s easier for our team to use,” says Sullivan. “Our release management team, for example, needs only push a button to kick off their release processes.”
Aftermath
“One thing we can say about FlexDeploy is that it just works,” said Sullivan. “The fear of changing from what you had and worrying about something not working doesn’t need to be there. Our progress has been as fast and efficient as we had hoped it would be, and successful along the way.”
