Cisco

In 1994, Cisco Systems Inc. made the decision to implement a new company wide ERP system. Initially, a large ERP solution was not a choice Cisco was willing pursue because of the nature of large project to become out of control and largely over budget. However, the legacy system in place constantly needed maintenance and the available upgrade was much too small for Cisco, which was growing at an astonishing 80% per year. Our analysis details Cisco’s choices, good and bad during the implementation process, and the circumstances involving intelligent and lucky decisions associated with the success of the project. Also, discussed is the degree of success the implementation had in terms of cost and performance. Finally, examined is the possibility of replication of Cisco’s ERP implementation model by other firms, and a summary section of lessons learned. Lessons learned contains summaries of the major success drivers and flaws in place, which contributed to the successful rollout of Cisco’s 15 million dollar ERP project in only nine months.

Introduction

Cisco Systems, Inc. is a big player in the Internet technologies field, manufacturing their primary product – the router. Two Stanford computer scientists founded the company in 1984, unbelievably by 1997, Cisco became a fortune 500 company and in the following year Cisco’s market capitalization was over $100 billion dollars. With the gigantic growth experienced Cisco needed to look into their future regarding their existing Enterprise Resource Planning package.

Unreliability and common outages brought into question the validity of trying to enlarge the current system to meet the Cisco’s constantly growing needs. The current system was a UNIX-based software package that supported financial, manufacturing, and order-entry systems. An upgrade was made available to Cisco, but would be a fix that offered more reliability and redundancy without maintainability or room for growth. The management structure in 1993...