Three Days To Three Minutes: How MRE Consulting Rewrote The Rules With Ingram Micro

For years, MRE Consulting has helped clients modernize their businesses. But when its own internal processes began slowing the company down, MRE turned to a longtime partner: Ingram Micro. The collaboration, centered on the Xvantage platform, ultimately transformed a manual, three-day quote-to-order workflow into an automated process that takes just three minutes.

MRE’s roots run deep in business and technology consulting. “MRE Consulting is a Houston based technology and business consulting and services firm,” said Dru Neikirk, vice president. The company’s tech division focuses on helping small to mid-sized clients “get the most of their IT investment” through support, automation and business process improvements.

Internally, though, one critical workflow had fallen behind. “For us, it was really the quote to order, the whole workflow process,” said Shayon Mazumder, director of IT managed services. “Everything was manual and it was really a lot of human validation and verification.” That bottleneck often stretched across several days.

Zachary Esmond, director of IT business development, detailed the complexity: logging into multiple portals, finding SKUs, confirming pricing, coordinating with accounting, generating documents, waiting for signatures and manually placing POs. “Truly taking a three day process,” he said, “and combining it down to three minutes.”

Through integration with Ingram Micro’s Xvantage platform, MRE can now generate quotes, secure approvals, receive e-signatures and submit purchase orders without leaving its PSA. The shift enables MRE “to deliver results faster,” Esmond said, while reducing overhead and increasing capacity. “Working with Ingram Micro has truly transformed our business.”

The improvement builds on a decade-long partnership rooted in steady growth. “Our relationship with Ingram Micro began in 2015 with procuring hardware,” Mazumder said. When MRE processed its first CSP transaction in 2016, he noted they were still early in their cloud journey “and we really didn’t know what we were doing.” Since then, the company has expanded significantly, earning recognition as Ingram Micro’s Security Partner of the Year and joining its Microsoft partner advisory board.

Esmond said Ingram Micro’s support is constant. “Ingram's involvement is pretty much daily,” he said. “They have subject matter expertise pretty much every step along the way.” The distributor also assists directly on complex opportunities. “They sit in the room with us sometimes whenever we're actually presenting to prospects.

Looking ahead, Mazumder said MRE is focused on scaling its services after its recent acquisition by Infosys. The combination, along with its partnership with Ingram Micro, allows MRE “to serve our clients in a much larger capacity” and continue its transformation into “a leading service provider.”

“At the end of the day,” he said, “Ingram Micro is the business behind our brand.”