DC Velocity - March 2017

BY DAVID MALONEY, CHIEF EDITOR

MANUFACTURING WAREHOUSING
Strategy

AS ONE OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST DIRECT-sales consumer businesses, Amway knows that the quality of its products is paramount to its success.

That’s why in an age when many companies outsource production, Amway chooses to manufacture a significant amount of its own health and beauty products, even growing some of the plants that will be used as ingredients on its own organic farms.

That can be a challenge. The manufacture of supplements and cosmetics is governed by a host of federal laws and regulations. Amway must follow the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) regulations, which specify how ingredients for these products are handled, stored, and used in manufacturing. Among many other things, the cGMP regulations require that production be performed in sanitary manufacturing environments.

All that had to be factored into the planning when

different products in all). The new manufacturing

operation, which opened in 2014, has allowed the

company to increase production of the soft gels. On

top of that, the facility’s proximity to the company’s
other manufacturing sites has created opportunities
for distribution economies of scale.

Though Spaulding had been a distribution center in its previous life, the Amway team started with a clean slate in designing the new manufacturing operation. Among other considerations, it would have to find a way to accommodate multiple activities with very different operating requirements under the same roof. Production, for example, would have to be performed in a sanitary manufacturing environment, while many of the manufacturing support functions, like receiving, storage, and shipping, could not possibly maintain the same levels of sanitation. That meant that areas would have to be set aside for these activities apart from the manufacturing cells.