By Joe Boomgaard | MiBiz
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ADA – Tucked away in the bowels of Amway’s sprawling manufacturing campus is a group of people bent on destroying the company’s products. They bend, twist, drop, drag, electrocute, submerse, freeze, bake, expose and generally try to push the whole range of products to their limits — all in an effort to ensure quality, durability and customer satisfaction.

Inside the company, the division works in what’s affectionately called the “Room of Doom,” although it’s part of a series of laboratories, focusing on packaging and product reliability, designed for engineers and other staffers to run batteries of tests and measurements on products using highly sophisticated equipment.

In all, the company has about $11-13 million wrapped up in its lab facilities spread throughout two separate areas of the Ada campus, said Mark Gammage, senior group leader for durables research and development. Gammage and Roy Kuennen, director of durables research and development, recently took MiBiz on a rare tour of the testing labs. Kuennen said the company’s been investing in new testing technology and equipment as most manufacturers have been looking to drive testing down to the supplier level. And it looks to add even more in the short term.

“If we don’t break it, we haven’t tested it,” Gammage told MiBiz.

The trials range from drop testing a bottle of lotion to ensure the container’s rigidity to accelerating the jolts and bumps a product and its packaging would endure in the normal course of shipping to placing products inside environmental test chambers to demonstrate temperature and humidity extremes of the regions where Amway’s products are shipped.

Other parts of the lab measure the bottles and closures to ensure they fit exactly so no product can escape regardless of its environment, which maintains quality. If the engineers and technicians identify problems with the packaging, they can act quickly in the plastics plant to minimize waste and reduce costs, he said.

Electronics, like Amway’s air filtration system or UV water purifier, go through life tests in which engineers allow the products to run for years and track for any failures. Or the engineers can set up automations that mimic long-time or extreme uses to put the products through the paces.

“The guys have to be inventive,” Gammage said of the engineers that develop the tests. “We have to test for reliability. When you get a dissatisfied customer, it hurts everything.”