SAP upgrade stunts Ingram Micro sales portal

Technology product distributor Ingram Micro has suffered system glitches this week owing to complications caused by a weekend back-office upgrade to an SAP system.

The upgrade, which began on January 31 after 12 months of preparations, was managed by Accenture.

The project aimed to replace a 10-year-old Adonis suite with an SAP system. Information on Ingram Micro partner portal Techlink has been inaccessible on several occasions this week.

Stuart Burtenshaw from inFront Techologies told iTnews sister publication CRN that he waited 25 minutes for his call to be answered after having problems accessing Techlink. When he was able to access the Techlink website he said “random content was missing, in some cases prices or photos or brochures”.

“They’ve absolutely communicated the implementation with us and I know these issues happen but it’s obvious that they haven’t got everything right,” he said.

Ingram earlier told CRN that product codes and some product descriptions would be modified on Techlink. 

"Despite communicating the changes on Techlink, inevitably our customers do have some questions now that the changes have rolled out and this is resulting in longer than normal call-wait times," said Grant Cleary, marketing director at Ingram Micro.

“We are aware of this, and we have a team of people working hard to resolve it as quickly as possible. We expect these response times to return back to normal as people become familiar with the system changes," he said. 

Further, Burtenshaw said daily data feeds that automatically updated website stock on hand would now only be updated weekly. 

"Every single night the old system would data feed the 6MB file...there will be a lot websites out with old information," he said.

Cleary said Ingram had "modified" the frequency of data feeds for a small group of our customers. "We have communicated this personally to each of these customers," he said.