Essay - Cisco ERP Case Study Cisco Systems, Inc - Implementing ERP...

Cisco ERP Case Study

Cisco Systems, Inc - Implementing ERP

Cisco quickly grew to be one of the most profitable and successful high tech manufacturers of networking equipment and services in ***** Silicon Valley during the early 1990s, averaging 80% annual growth during the period of ***** case study. Their rapid and unexpected ***** as a company ***** obsoleted the traditional approach of managing Information Technologies (IT) in general ***** Enterprise Resource Plann*****g (*****) specifically by aligning these resources ***** functional departments. The Cisco CIO, Pete Solvik, had envisioned the company having dedicated and exclusive IT systems, networks and resources aligned by line*****of-business, a common practice in ***** early and mid-*****. This siloing or isolating of IT systems ***** ***** by line-*****-business however drastically impacted the companies' ability to function effectively.

***** January, 1994 ***** legacy systems that ***** been defined by line-of-business became so overburdened that the main database that ***** operated on ceased to ***** and became corrupted. Legacy systems were definition those pricing, production scheduling, material planning ***** master ***** enterprise software applications that had been continually added ***** over time and had in many *****s become very difficult to support. Legacy systems are often designed and developed to only meet a specific set of highly unique process needs, ***** therefore have little if any ability ***** integrate with other *****. As a result, the line-*****-business ***** often st*****y disconnected from larger ***** systems, fur*****r leading to inefficiencies. What has exacerbated Cisco's attempts to keep its main ***** free of errors and over-writes which caused chaos in January, 2004 was the lack of *****tegration pre-***** in legacy systems. Cisco had grown so rapidly that it failed to update the underlying MRP, production scheduling, and fulfillment processes the ***** systems had ironically been developed ***** automate. The legacy system problem, now ***** by ***** lack ***** integration across lines of business, was creating chaos in the main database responsible for managing ***** entire comp*****.

*****'s senior executives had been in previous manufactur*****g companies and realized that an Enterprise ***** Planning (ERP) system ***** unified departments and created a greater level ***** synchronization between departments at the process level than was possible ***** ***** ***** was ***** answer. As the ERP implementation would cost an estimated $15M ***** take 9 months to complete. The Cisco Board of Directors had to vote and approve ***** the plan. ***** installations are not just a large IT project. They ***** instead a complete re-ex*****mining of the company's business model and a re-defining of interprocess communication and ***** defining of process condu*****s between *****s. In short, Cisco completely re-architected the core ***** processes that their company was based on, down to the Bill of Materials (BOM) used ***** managing their producti***** operations.

As the company completed the multi-phased implementation plan for getting ***** ERP system up and running, the decision was made to also get a data warehouse in place and function*****g. The data warehouse ***** give the company, for the first *****