Cisco Systems,Inc: Implementing ERP : Case Analysis

They faced challenges from acquiring many companies because during the acquisitions Bombardier inherited the data, processes and systems of each company which created inefficiencies. Systems didn’t communicate with each other resulting in low inventory turns and price inconsistency. This was not productive for Bombardier and was time consuming for the employees. The biggest problem was the low visibility of inventory and the lack of communication between systems. Bombardier had now a global presence but was not organized to maintain growth without changing the vision and processes. Another challenge is resistance to change, this factor can have a huge impact on the new vision and

The case shows the implementation of SAP ERP solution in NIBCO, a manufacturer of pipe and fittings, a mid-size manufacturer with about 3,000 employees and revenue over 460 million USD. The company

Cisco’s current strategy attempts to do too much and appeal to a much too broad target market, and thus needs to consider different strategies.

Lesley Stowe, the founder of Lesley Stowe Fine Foods, and her management team are faced with a critical decision of selecting an Enterprise Resource Planning system. In the early stages of her business, Lesley created a cracker that she named “Raincoast Crisps”, which was one of the reasons why her business grew across Western Canada. In 2012, she created six new flavours of the “Raincoast Crisps” and further expanded her business to “Power Cookies”, allowing her company to compete in industries such as the meal replacements. This rapid expansion has developed into a considerable headache in terms of collecting and processing data information at a larger scale. The current state of her SaaS ERP platform is unable to support the volume in that the LSFF is distributing, which is draining resources indefinitely. Employees are operating the

In business, it is important for companies to be able to communicate effectively. Each department of a company relies on the other departments as they add to the value chain. One way for a company to integrate its different departments is enterprise resource planning. ERPs are software programs that allow companies to join together data across operations on a company wide basis (Jessup and Valacich 248). ERPs store company information in a common database and allow all departments to access it from one central location (Koch). Companies without ERPS may contain many legacy systems, each operating with different

1a. How did Cisco find itself in trouble with regard to its intended IT prior to Brad Boston's arrival?

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).

"You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing that if you weren’t trying to be like Cisco, you were falling behind, their systems are so brilliant. I’m sorry. It’s clear it’s not the case." What Cisco’s systems didn’t do was model what would happen if one critical assumption?growth?was removed from both their forecasts and their mind-sets. If Cisco had run even modestly declining demand models, Chambers and Carter might have seen the consequences of betting on more inventory. But Cisco had enjoyed more than 40 straight quarters of stout growth. In its immediate past were three quarters of extreme growth as high as 66 percent. The numbers the virtual close presented to the eye of the beholders?the Cisco executives?painted a picture of the present as lovely and pleasant as a Monet landscape. According to many observers, Cisco’s fundamental blunder was to rely on that pretty picture to assume the future would be equally pretty. The Inventory Buildup CISCO’S HISTORY is like Mount Saint Helens. Its explosive success blew the side off the old economy rules of slow, steady growth. Cisco rose above a crop of small networking companies through two strategies: outsourced manufacturing and growth through acquisition. From the time it went public 11

Nestle is a multinational company based on Switzerland, was establish long ago in 1866 by Henri nestle which supplies different kinds of food products. Over the period nestle has grown as one of the big company. Nestle USA is a part of nestle company, having seven business divisions: beverage, confection and snacks, food service, foreign trade, nutrition, prepared food and sales. Some of Its popular products in USA were: Alpo, Nescafe, Tasters choice. Its annual revenue was 8.1 billion and 16000 employees were working. In 1992 enterprise resource planning (ERP) system provider SAP introduced the R3 system of client server architecture and Nestle USA has decided to implement R3 ERP system in

The focus is to identify the practices vs. the best of the best practices in the industry in relation to ERP implementation and offer specifics on how to make this third round provide a higher success rate.

5. Evaluate the steps that were taken in the ERP activities. Which were done well and which could be improved?

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.

Since it was critical to Cisco’s strategic commitment of advancing, the company had to pick the best option to implement quickly. The two alternatives were know as: create knowledge and expand the community. With key decision criteria , this report carefully examines both of the options that can quickly be implemented and yet help Cisco integrate into IoE era.

This case was written by P. Indu, under the direction of Vivek Gupta, IBS Center for Management Research. It was compiled