A Study of Cisco's ERP System

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

ERP projects are most definitely expensive and risky, nevertheless despite these potential costs KEDA decided to embark on its ERP implementation project in hopes of obtaining a high return on investment. One of the factors that led to this decision was the fierce competition of global and local competitors. In an effort to retain its position within the industry and combat the threat of other businesses, KEDA needed to evolve. Specifically, through choosing a new ERP system, KETA hoped that this strategy would improve operations and become a productive advancement to the structure of the company. Since the Chinese government stopped their support and the MRP-II couldn’t manage the multiple system operations, they had to seek out a new alternative.

BPOC was set up in the late 2002. BPOC was a cross-functional decision-making group created to set and drive corporate priorities for the company. The role of the BPOC was like the COO. BPOC had full formal authority to approve any IT initiatives. Though it did not fund the IT projects, it approved them. BPOC was created to set and drive the corporate priorities for

Cisco Systems, Inc.: Implementing ERP [HBR case #699022] Reviews Cisco System's approach to implementing Oracle's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software product. This case chronologically reviews the diverse, critical success factors and obstacles facing Cisco during its implementation. Cisco faced the need for information systems replacement based on its significant growth potential and its reliance on failing legacy systems. The discussion focuses on where management was particularly savvy in contrast to where it was the beneficiary of good fortune.

An extensive research was done to fetch the historical background of company, the functioning of its legacy systems, and the issues that are being faced by the company as a result of ERP implementation. However, there are only few studies that showed ERP case studies for the company relative to the ERP issues.The web searches provided a restricted account of data on company’s ERP profile. In order to find details of the issues that are being faced by the

The task to find out more information on the enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) an integrated systems package has been assigned to Beutler. The company has looked at the strengths and weaknesses of seven ERP packages they have been presented. Due to the high risk of using a Big Bang Approach, a high-risk project it was vital that the

1. Cisco suffered from inertia when an attempt was made to engage business management in selecting software for their individual areas, and/or agreeing to participate in the ERP implementation project. List and explain reasons why management would hesitate to become engaged in the IT process/project.

The ERP information management system consolidates all of the healthcare organization's operation into one simple, easy to use system by eliminating redundancy and decreasing repeated keying of the same information into multi-information systems so the organization can better process and manage information throughout the organization. In most healthcare organizations, the ERP information management system is used for finance, quality, inventory management, and procurement (Brooks, August 28, 2013) (Langabeer II & Helton, 2016).

The case presents the implementation of an ERP system in Bombardier, along with all the major changes the corporation undertook for a successful transition. In the analysis I will address the challenges faced by Bombardier, the challenges associated with the integration of the large system & its benefits. I will also address how the project team managed and communicated it’s vision amongst the firm and how the new roles

The problem presented by Joseph-Armand Bombardier is the upcoming third round of ERP implementation in his organization. Even though a big improvement over the efficiency and success of execution between the first ERP round (Mirabel plant) and second round (Saint-Laurent plant), there is still room for improvement.

Q1. ERP projects are expensive and risky. Why did Keda decide to embark on an ERP?

A lot is being talked about in the market about ERP and Best of Breed software. ERP has been dominating the technology area for a while now, whereas the best of breed is still struggling to find place in the market. ERP might be an excellent platform to support any business but it has also been criticized for not being flexible and not being able to meet specific needs of industry. This is where the best of breed gains an advantage over the ERP systems, by developing standard software and customizing according to the business needs. ERP and Best of Breed have their own advantages over each other. While ERP can be used at bigger platforms where a complete solution is required, Best of breed approach can be used when the focus is towards a particular area as integrating different processes makes it a cumbersome process.

Cisco rapidly grew from a start-up to $500M global corporation by January, 1993 when the case begins with Pete Solvick, CIO of the company faced with the daunting task of upgrading its transaction systems and data warehouse. Cisco had exponential growth through the 1990s, averaging at one point an 80% compound annual growth rate while also accelerating new product development and introductions throughout its direct and indirect sales channels. Systems outages were becoming more common as were product shortcomings due to the IT systems supporting key processes becoming faulty and only partially operating the majority of the time. Clearly Cisco had outgrown its current transaction processes and data warehousing infrastructure.

Because Tektronix previously had problems implementing IT projects, the company was mindful that replacing their legacy systems could be a risky undertaking. Further, it was well-known that wide-scale ERP implementation would be a very costly endeavor. Consequently, Tektronix managed the risks of its ERP implementation by having a coherent, guiding vision entailing: 1) separability of the businesses; 2) leveraging shared services; and 3) staying as "plain vanilla" as possible.

ERP, which is an abbreviation for Enterprise Resource Planning, is principally an integration of business management practices and modern technology. Information Technology (IT) integrates with the core business processes of a corporate house to streamline and accomplish specific business objectives. Consequently, ERP is an amalgamation of three most important components; Business Management Practices, Information Technology and Specific Business Objectives.