Mr. Navdeep Narula, Executive Director – Mobility, Compute & IoT at Ingram Micro India, has a rich and diversified experience across various functions such as sales, marketing, service, and channel operations in IT and telecom sectors. In an interaction with NCN Magazine, Mr. Navdeep Narula shares about Ingram Micro India’s market focus, customer-orientation and business strategy for the Indian market.
Ingram Micro India Pvt Ltd (IMIL) is a subsidiary of Ingram Micro Inc, USA, with a 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.
Since innovation in IoT is the core of Ingram Micro’s business model, please elaborate on your offerings in this respect?
Ingram Micro is at the forefront of providing end to end solutions in the fast-growing IoT domain. Our IoT solutions catalogue has over 50 solutions, which follow the use case approach combining the products of both greenfield and brownfield partners from our large base of technology vendors. We have also set up a global IoT centre of excellence. As a solution aggregator, we have partnered with various ISVs and have solutions in the following sectors – 1. Supply chain and logistics; 2. Facial recognition & AI; 3. Manufacturing; 4. Smart workplace; 5. Smart city; and 6. Assisted reality and virtual reality.
What role does Ingram play in WFH, connected home and consumer technology?
Products related to the connected home or consumer IoT are part of our convergence business initiative. We consider this as an emerging new business, and it remains a top focus for us. In this segment, we’ve already begun to align with major vendors, SIs, and platform partners. Our goal is to help our partners give their customers with a futuristic smart home experience. Smart lighting, smart entertainment, smart security, smart networks, and smart surveillance are just a few of the intriguing solutions available. A significant problem here is the lack of a single platform on which all the various ideas can be implemented. Add in the intricacy of the number of independent smart gadgets that are being released, and even the most advanced user will be baffled. With the help of our SI partners and having access to a large number of consumer technology brands in the relevant categories of mobile phones, laptops, tablets, smart TVs, IP cameras, smart audio, home networking, media streamers, smart lights, home automation etc, we are building simple, intuitive and scalable connected home solutions and will train our partners to deploy these. We believe that the latent demand is extremely strong, and a large number of discerning customers are simply waiting for the right offering. The demand for connected homes is getting fuelled further with the advent of ‘Work from home’ and ‘Learn from home’ and we would like to invite like-minded partners to join us in this journey at this early stage.
Tell us about Ingram Micro E-Commerce. How does it benefit the partners?
Ingram Micro India E-Commerce has many facets to it – the first one is the IMeCOM B2B self-service portal for our partners, where we offer a wide range of technology products with the ease of doing business. Partners can log into the portal and check the product details, availability and pricing on a real-time basis and place their orders. Over 13,000 partners are already onboarded on this portal purchasing directly from this portal, which also publishes reports for partners to review their account details, statements, invoices, etc. The portal also has brand boutiques providing a specialised experience for our principal partners. It has attractive promotions and offers a quick quote/basket generation feature, which is triggered by the Ingram account manager as per his understanding of the partner’s requirement that can simply be accepted by the partner on his mobile phone, and complete the order placement with extreme convenience.
The other areas pertaining to e-commerce are the partner forecast portal that helps bring higher predictability in providing supplies & allocation and also the CTO portal, which offers ‘Configure to Order’ services for products having multiple options and hence large permutations and combinations. These are, however, applicable to selected business lines.
What are the Ingram Micro programs in the segment of Inventory-as-a-service? How do you invest in partners and help them grow?
As a technology product supplier to our partners, we completely appreciate the need to optimise the working capital deployed by our partners in their business. The product life cycles can be short and unpredictable leading to obsolescence of the inventory and could cause a potential liability. We have devised the B2B2C program, which is an extremely powerful value preposition allowing partners to integrate with Ingram ERP through direct API connect. Post integration, partners can have a completely automated & real-time product, price and availability information leading to auto-replenishment and delivery of the material. At the core of it, our intent is to offer our Inventory-as-a-service to our partners. Theoretically, our intent is to completely avoid an ‘out of stock’ situation to their end customer, hence not having any opportunity of a loss of business. Such a program is very effective in managing working capital deployed in slow-moving tail SKUs and for the large range of accessories products. The partners may also opt for direct delivery to their end-customers across the country through our last-mile logistics services, and this amounts to an end-to-end inventory-as-a-service solution. The larger B2B2C ecosystem from Ingram Micro provides economy of scale to our partners, and there is a lot of excitement among our partners and vendor principals about this initiative.
Discuss the evolving role of the distribution business?
Consumer behaviour has changed dramatically after the onset of Covid-19 and the challenge shifted from ‘right product to right customer’ to ‘making the saleable stocks available’ due to global chip shortages and supply chain issues. We were presented with a paradigm shift in resolving the unique challenges faced by distributors.
While companies are innovating cutting-edge technologies and services, the distribution enterprise is in a constant state of evolution as well, to enable channel partners to bring these solutions to their valued customers. Nowadays, we see terms such as Industry 4.0 which includes Machine Learning, AI, IoT and combining Industry 4.0 with supply chain Indian industries can transform their distribution channel and can turn the drawbacks into opportunities. This evolution is not just in terms of unique capabilities and offers one can take to the market, but also to ensure its profitability for everyone in the value chain.
It’s no more ‘one channel fits all’ – the choice of a distribution channel now determines the strategic direction for a business. The value of the product is truly realised when it has an upgraded & evolved channel to complement. Our current philosophy is to identify the right channel partners for the business, acknowledge the changing dynamics of the business, appreciate the problems faced by our partners and work with our vendor principals to provide them with automated and transparent business processes to resolve their challenges.
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