Mohammed Alsaihati

SEIS-705
Case Study 5
11/15/2014
Cisco System Inc, Implementing ERP
Cisco System Inc was an internet technology company founded in 1984. With the internet
technology boom Cisco became market leader in producing internet technologies so much so that
in 1997, within 13 years of its formation, Cisco became a part of Fortune 500. Cisco was
founded by two Stanford scientists with the investment of Don Valentine.
CISCO CIO Pete Solvik due to his experience and company potential wanted to grow the
company but the UNIX based software package running the core transaction of the business was
not able to support the changing needs of the business. Solvik wanted to avoid an ERP based
solution because of his concerns about them. During this period in 1993 the functional areas
system replacement difficulties and limitations lead to the deterioration of CISCO legacy
environment. This lead to a change in approach in system replacement process, it was now
decided that system change will be looked from the perspective of manufacturing and Order
Entry and Finance department will be influenced in to performing a complete system
replacement of all the applications within the company, instead of doing separate projects.
A team of best business people with KPMG as integration partner was developed to help
in implementation of the new system at CISCO. After through research by the team and its
partner Oracle was chosen as the new application software to be applied. The team developed a
plan to implement ERP by the third Quarter of the company next financial year so that the fourth
and final quarter runs smoothly. This gave them almost 9 months at the maximum with the

budget leading to $15 million. The plan was presented to the board along with the justification
for the expense and the compulsive need for CISCO to implement the new ERP. The board
approved the project as marked it as one of the top seven goals of the companys new financial
year.
For the implementation five process are teams were developed with each track team had a
CISCO information leader, business leader, business or IT consultants from KPMG or Oracle
and additional personals as team members. The team developed an implementation technique
referred to as rapid interactive prototyping broken down in to series of phases called
conference room plots (CRP).
The first CRP (CRP0) involved training of implementation team and initializing the
technical environment. The second CRP (CRP1) aimed to ensure that each track makes the
system work in this area. With CRP2 having the goal of system testing hardware as well as
software and the addition and amendments in the scope of implementation the project team was
in the most difficult phase of implementation. CRP3 aimed to test the companys full system
assess the readiness to go live. The final test was conducted in January and its result was
successful. With this the company was ready for cutover in February.