Cisco

1. Describe the objective of the case.

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 provided that each functional business unit make its own decisions regarding the future of their IT systems. Each department head knew that “ban-aiding” the current system was not going to be sufficient in coordination with the company’s rapid growth. However, no individual was willing to approach the board with a costly and lengthy proposal for replacement of the legacy systems.  Pete Solvick CIO of Cisco did not primarily want to undertake a huge company wide ERP project, but in January of 1994, a system failure halted nearly the entire business for two days, and the problem could no longer be ignored.

Solvick, along with other managers put together a plan to take on replacement of all faulty legacy applications in a single ERP project that would provide a common data architecture throughout each business unit.

2. Discuss the issues and relate to class, textbook and internet sources.

There were a number of issues that Cisco faced. Since the need for a new ERP...