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Cisco Case Essay

Decent Essays

1. At the start of the case, Cisco’s information systems are failing, yet no one steps forward to lead the effort to replace them. Why is this? Why were no managers eager to take on this project?
Why is this?
When Peter Solvik joined Cisco in January 1993 as the company's CIO, Cisco was a $500 million company running a UNIX-based software package to support its core transaction processing, including financial, manufacturing, and order entry systems. At that time, Cisco was experiencing significant growth. However, the application didn't provide the degree of redundancy, reliability, and maintainability that Cisco needed to meet the business requirements anymore. The current systems may be good for $300 million companies, but they were …show more content…

Besides, the team members were placed onto one of five "tracks". Each tracks had a Cisco information systems leader, a Cisco business leader, business and IT consultants from either KPMG or Oracle, and additional personnel from the business as team members.
5.Cisco had very efficient training program for the team--The first CRP(CRP0) began with training the implementation team. First training was focus on getting the team trained on the Oracle applications in two 16-hours days. Second training was to participate the entire application suite. At end of training, a small "tiger team" was engaged.
6.Cisco had very effective Implementation Methodology--Team employed a development technique referred to as "rapid iterative prototyping" and broke the implementation into a series of phases called "Conference Room Pilots"(CRP)
1) CRP 0: Training and Configuration of Oracle package.
2) CRP 1: Detail documentation and analysis of each functional area. The team determined to need another package to support after-sales.
3)CRP 2 & 3: Centralized data warehouse was developed. Final Testing with full load of users was done.
Although all of above factors played very important role in the success of ERP implementation, the most important one should be the clear understanding of its strategic goal. Cisco did correctly to define themselves and realize the current problem and make plan

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