Ingram Micro India Pvt Ltd (IMIL) is a subsidiary of Ingram Micro Inc, USA. Established in 1979, IMIL today is one of the top IT Distribution companies in India with nationwide presence at nearly 40+ locations. Ingram Micro Inc (the parent company of IMIL) is the world’s largest technology distributor, providing sales, marketing and logistics services for the IT industry worldwide. In an interaction with NCN, Mr. Sanjib Sahoo, EVP, Chief Digital Officer, Ingram Micro India, shares about changes in the distribution system in the current digital drive.
Q. Almost every organization is on a digital business transformation journey. How is Ingram Micro approaching digitalization differently?
Digital transformation done right requires an organization to be both aggressively digital and amazingly human. At Ingram Micro, we are distinguishing ourselves more and more by our people and our digital twin Xvantage. We are not chasing shiny technology. We are operating at scale with tremendous success as the business behind the world’s brand. With reach into 90% of the world’s population, Ingram Micro is creating and capturing more business value using the combination of incredible people, actionable data and innovative technology. We have embraced a spirit of digitization and a mindset for growth. In every country where Ingram Micro is present, we are making the experience of doing business the wow for our customers and partners. Since most of the digital transformations fail with the main reasons of mindset and failing to create value, we have taken a new concept of DigiOps where we have taken the operational best talents to build the bridge with technology and constantly work on capturing true business value.
Q. What are some of your observations concerning the challenges and opportunities in digital transformation among Asia Pacific organizations?
Digital transformation generally in the organizations takes a long horizon. The challenge companies have is how do they perform as they transform? Which means that they have to perform as an organization as well as start the transformation together, which requires a lot of focus investment, strategic shift and mindset and all of that. Companies generally speaking have performance and opportunity gaps. Performance gaps are easier to fix than opportunity gaps and generally there is a lot of technology innovation but still there’s a little bit of a follow up on how to transform the models based on the innovations happening in the other partners of the world. This means that generally in organization there’s not a healthy balance in investment in tech vs investment changing the entire business and the process. Digital transformation is hardly about technology. It’s about changing the mindset and creating a continuous value within the culture. That is where some challenges come in ASIA PAC organizations. They’ve been at this a long time. Change is hard so we must remove fear from the culture, embrace change and fail fast. This is not always easy and that’s where the challenges are. The risk appetite has to be more in APAC organizations. Today instead of risk is bad, calculated risk is innovation.
The last thing is to have more collaboration between the whole teams – in tech and business. That’s why the DigiOps concept is so important. You need the balance. True transformation needs both human and business prowess. And when they don’t mesh together you can’t win. There’s not curriculum of training within the APAC region to foster this mindset and sill and that’s where the challenges are for many organizations in this theatre.
Q. Data is the fuel for the digital economy, and has a big role in any business transformation strategy. As CDO, what aspects of data do you see as most critical for operations, decisions and experience? How do AI and other emerging technologies help?
Data is the oxygen and the fuel for digital transformation. You really cannot have a transformation without clean, actionable data. It’s not about how much big data or small data you have… It’s using it to drive more meaningful customer experiences and building a data-driven operationally efficient organization.
Generally there are two parts of data: OLTP – transactional data processing and OLAP is online analytical processing. The real critical part of data is having a real time data mesh that understands and syncs operational and transactional data that creates real time insights and= drives meaningful transactions and makes them more like interactions to create a meaningful customer experience.. The ability to have harmonized data across the org and fed to the autonomous engines we have created and make them intelligent is very critical. And as data matures through different phases it provides a solid foundation for how you can operate as an organization. I also look at building a singling source of truth so that our OLTP and OLAP can interact with each other and create real insights and help us become a real data-driven business.
The last part is using data we can provide insights to help our partners do business better. That’s missing in today’s organizations. These insights need to be integrated into the platform so they use it, customize it and make it actionable. This can improve profits and go to market. So in the case of Ingram Micro it’s like our partners have a $54B dollar company partnering behind them to do business better and show up stronger with more value capture and more value creation.
As for AI, it’s very critical but AI will not be successful if you don’t have clean data. You must make the effort to aggregate and clean up data. We use AI in everything. For example we use AI to make the Xvantage platform self learning and to create a Netflix type experience for our customers. Everything is touched by AI with clean data as our foundation.
Q. In the digital economy, one of the weakest pillars is in logistics and the supply chain. Innovation and transformation in this critical aspect of business seem to be slower than in other areas. How is Ingram Micro redefining the distribution sector?
Ingram Micro is on its path to become a platform company – we are working to match supply and demand with data combined with predictive analytics. We are working to understand the demand our partners are bringing in so we can optimize the logistics and supply chain to match with the intelligence and the data. What we do is instead of focusing on pure play distribution, we are moving more toward helping our partners sell outcomes using solutions and sell everything as and with service. We really want them to be able to it all inside our platform and with the support of our team. We’re automating and doing a lot of self service to drive efficiencies in operations and give our associates room to do more with more for more.
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