Ingram Micro Reviews

Pros

Great teams, great leaders, and overall a wonderful place to kick start a career in the IT industry. You have the opportunity to engage with so many Fortune 500 companies on the vendor side as well as the VARs. Management is very professional and open with associates when changes are to occur. Ideal if you are looking for a solid work/life balance

Cons

Employees are very underpaid in regards to industry standards. Very process driven which can hold back individuals from being able to think outside of the box and create new ways of doing business.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work but make a point to review the compensation of jr. & mid level associates as well as bonus structure.

Pros

As a big company, you have a lot of options for career growth.

Cons

It is easy to get lost in the crowd. This can be good or bad depending on how visible you want to be.

Pros

Working for a Fortune 100 company, and world leader in technology distribution gives a great experience. You will build great relationships with major suppliers and customers.

Cons

Too fast pace and dynamic environment with too many conflicting priorities, often makes it hard to cope up with. Higher stress level.

Advice to Senior Management

Sometime slow down, and give fewer critical priorities. Dont allow employees to burn down. Strategy need to be driven from top-down.

Pros

I believe that the only pro to working at Ingram Micro is the pay.

Cons

No comunication
No Fairness overall
Management did not take care of workers who stood around and did nothing all day
Too many unnecessary rules

Advice to Senior Management

Do not make your workers work so many hours a day, week, month, without a day off. Work at fixing complaints reported and resolving issues before they arise to greater ones. Have employee fairness to everyone not just certain groups. Have workers who are not working repremanded, and not pin it on the ones who are doing their job. Have Christmas and Thanksgiving off so workers can be home with their families.

Pros

Fortune 69 Company and big name in distribution industry.

Cons

Very Very poor executive management . Zero Motivation for employees and very dis-respectful of workers.

Advice to Senior Management

Wake Up and Look how you are managing the company /Employees

Pros

There is usually nice work hours

Cons

It can be stressful sometimes

Advice to Senior Management

want work bins back at desks

Pros

Understand how to manage Channel Partners.
Network with loads and loads of Channel Resellers.
Understand issues/processes with the distribution business.
Getting a job at Ingram is a piece of cake. They'll hire you if you act competent in the interview.
Job security is good.

Cons

Pay scale does not match market standards.
Increment is very menial (4%-7%)
Infrastructure is HORRIBLE. (Desktop PCs from the 90s/Take awfully LONG to start)
Basic things like access to email over the phone is not provided.
Very limited technical growth.
Distributor sales folks are neither respected by partners/resellers nor by principle vendors.
Attrition rate is very high. People come and go as they see no benefit sticking around.

Advice to Senior Management

Please explain the benefits of working with Ingram Micro to your employees.
Equip the company with better IT infrastructure. You're distributors of great infra after all.
Give email access over the phone. (Isn't this a norm these days?)
Offer a competitive package and HR should give better benefits in terms of remuneration.

Pros

Love some of the people I work with. You will learn some useful skills through their training classes although through out the years they scaled back on that as well. Depends on your department, you might get a competent manager that will truly be interested in helping you develop at Ingram, otherwise good luck to you.

Cons

Many things..where do I start?..below are some of the most obvious cons at IM

- One of the cheapest Fortune 100 company around, love to talk about how much cash they have on hand and what kind of business they should go out and acquire but at the same time, will layoff people, cut promotion, freeze wages and hiring the moment the market is softer than they expect. With all that cash on hand, you would think they will actually invest in their people. Instead, they will outsource everything they can, from ops, tech support, recruiting..etc. I understand if the company is losing money then cutback must be made but when the company is making money and you're still cutting back, that's just a slap to the employee morale. Stop trying to please Wall street investors, the reason IM stock is going nowhere because distribution isn't an exciting or fast growing business, stop trying to be the next Baidu.com, this is a mid-cap slow growth stock at best.

-The company is so cheap they basically told the employee to bring in food (as potluck) to celebrate the company's 30th anniversary. That's right, no company wise catering, bring your own food to celebrate their success.

-The last couple of years, they have been cutting back on labor cost, so guess what? Capped vacation hours, cut back on 401k matching. mandatory forced furlough during Christmas and fewer and fewer off site (and when we do have one, it's something really cheap). Health benefit is getting more and more expensive, yet we only get a very small credit per paycheck to offset the cost. For me with one dependent I have to pay over $100+ each check for health insurance alone.

-Changed their bonus structure to benefit upper management. We used to get a decent percentage of our annual wages X performance target but last year IM dropped it by half but they raised the performance target to make it look like you can get more money. Unfortunately the math doesn't add up, the drop basically equals to way less even if the company overachieve. This is bad, but to add insult to injury, when they chopped it by half they only did so for non-managers. For managers and upper management, they still get old percentage.

-Lack of decision making freedom at the lower level, even middle managers often lack the final decision making authority. At the end, this company is all about authoritative control from top down. Even though you think you have the right idea and experience to defend your decision, at the end it doesn't matter. Upper management will not respect your decision and will overrule you on it to suit their needs. Most of the time, we're busy bending backward catering to sales,resellers and vendors. Marketing, Ops and different departments essentially just function as "Yes Sir" to sales regardless of how ridiculous the request maybe, afterward, sales just need to bring in the bacon, they don't have to clean up the mess.

-Favoritism to the max. You will see that in your own department, from peer doing less work than you, coming in late all the time or calling in sick at the drop of a dime, to seeing people getting promoted without the qualification. If you know the right people or are like by certain someone at upper management, you can skip steps in getting promoted (Going from a Marketing manager I to Vendor business manager..etc) However, if you don't play into the politics, even if you have the know how and the experience, it will be a slow process to even move one step. When you do, you will discover how small the merit increase is, low single digit percentage to the next grade? Seriously? Other companies do that just on the yearly review. They will dangle that little piece of carrot with a magnifying class in front, once you get to it, you'll realize how small the carrot really is.

- Big income gap between non-managers to upper management (Director levels and above). This is not really specify to Ingram but they are not doing anything to make it better either. They know wages and compensation is an issue from the company survey yet fail to address it years after years. Look at the salary range on here and you'll see a difference between marketing manager and a Director. Also, job titles are mis-leading. Marketing manager is no more than a marketing rep at other companies and their pay certainly do not reflect the income of a Marketing Manager, same goes for their accountant..etc.

-Stop with the silly internal slogan..."Get to Yes!" Do you really mean Get to Yes when sales request for something and Yes to profit? Sales will love to throw that slogan at you when they want something done their way regardless of how ridiculous it is. Don't you guys remember the whole "Do whatever it takes" tag line...for us old timer, we all remember how well that worked out...Instead how about "Get to Yes" in investing in your workers, or "Get to Yes" on profit sharing, "Get to Yes" on becoming more democratic in decision making process at the lower level....

Advice to Senior Management

Wake up call to management, take a look at some of the other successful companies out there (Facebook, Google..W.L.Gore..etc) and observe how sometimes a flatter organization structure might benefit the company. I understand some of you might have control issues but having too many managers and directors will only complicate the process. Also, invest in your people, spend a little bit more money to really appreciate your workforce. Don't be so short sighted, the less turn over you guys have the more money you will save and people are willing to work harder for the success of the company.

Pros

The people at Ingram Micro are great. By people, I mean people on your team, not the middle-management. You can get through your day because of the immediate people you work with.

Cons

Some of the middle-management are jokes. They manage by threats and fear. Some have gotten to their level by no effort of their own, they look at their team as their minions to their work. These managers have no idea how to manage a team yet their can snow their own bosses to get them to think they did the work.

Advice to Senior Management

If you're going to do a skip-level review, listen to what employees are saying. Success is driven by a whole group of people, not just the few noise-makers.

Pros

professional staff, good benefits, fairly decent place to work, its generally alright, Its ok and
I think its O.K.

Cons

Need to make some improvements to the overall process of promotion. Not concerned enough about the
employee in my opinion.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to make some improvements to the overall process of promotion. Not concerned enough about the
employee in my opinion.