Cisco Erp Case

Cisco is a very large firm and is growing at a rate of 80% and is currently a $500 million company. Cisco’s IT systems were running on a UNIX-based software package which could at best scale up to size for a $300 million company. Cisco was anticipating becoming a $1 billion company in the near future. Cisco’s legacy systems are failing as they cannot handle the volume of data and transactions.

Cisco traditionally had an approach of repairing or solving problems in their systems only when they faced issues. Cisco allowed autonomy within each department and every department was independent of one another. This led to hesitation among the managers of the departments to implement large projects in spite of knowing the inherent problems in their current systems. The managers felt that the costs and timeline of projects such as ERP implementation are too large to justify for their respective departments and hence nobody really took forward a step to replace them. None of the managers wanted to throw out the legacy systems as they felt it would involve disruption of business implementing an entire new software package. The manager’s hesitation was typical of Cisco’s reactive approach to IT development or advances where they believed in upgrading or repairing the systems only when the problems arose. It was only a major breakdown of the system for two days which coerced Peter Solvik and Cisco managers to take the decision of going for ERP implementation.

Cisco was highly successful in the implementation of ERP system. The success of this project can be contributed to several factors. Cisco had a clear project plan in place before any implementation efforts were started. Teams were put in place with appropriate mix of lower and upper management as well as people across different departments as they realized that the implementation could not be an IT-only initiative. The project was given top priority in the company with the “best and brightest” people picked to work on...