2013

Submitted By

Gaurav Singh

(12120)

About CISCO

Established in 1984

Primary product was Router

In 1997 entered into elite club of fortune 500

Among top 5 companies in return on investment and in return on assets

Exceptional growth in 1998 as companies’ market capitalization passed $100 billion

mark (15 times 1997 sales)

Financial year divided into four quarters starting from 1st August

IT Department at CISCO

Pete Solvik joined as CIO in January 1993

Running a Unix based software package to support core operating and transactional

process of the company

Package was majorly supporting three functional areas

o Financials

o Manufacturing

o Order Entry

Biggest customer of the software vendor

WHY ERP

Company was able to sustain an annual growth rate of 80% and legacy system was not

able to handle such load

Frequent system outages

Due to inability of system to perform a workaround caused corruption of database which

resulted in SHUT DOWN OF COMPANY for two days

This was the defining moment for the company as after this top management decided to

implement ERP. About a month after the shutdown they created a team to do an investigation to

replace the application.

Gauarv Singh 12120 ERP 2

IMPLEMENTATION OF ERP – APPROACH

1) Selection of an ERP Product

Major decision which they took and reason behind that:

a) Whom to give responsibility from company

i. It was critically important project

ii. Requires heavy involvement from business community to make project successful

iii. DECISION CISCO management pulled out very vest people from their team

to do the work

b) How and how many partner to select from Industry

i. There help was needed for the decision of selection and implementation of

software

ii. Great technical skills and industry knowledge was must

iii. DECISION Chose KPMG as integration partner. KPMG gave their best

people for this project. i.e. Program manager for this project was their director of

IT.

c) Which software to select

i. One of the most important decision

ii. Approach

i. Took help from large corporates

ii. Guidance of research sources like Gartner group

iii. By tapping existing user of package

iii. Vendor selection process

i. Systematic and standard procedure

ii. RFP

iv. DECISION Oracle was selected as vendor

i. Strong and better manufacturing capability

ii. Promise Long term sustainable relationship

iii. Flexibility as office was very near by

Gauarv Singh 12120 ERP 2

2) Approval from Board

Two key decisions need to be taken before approaching board

i. COST of the project

ii. Timeline / END – DATE of the project

By Systematic thinking and involvement of all partners, taking all factors into consideration they

approached board and convinced for project.

Cost: $15 million

Duration: 9 months

3) Implementation of Building team

Factors need to be considered

Size of the team

Role and responsibility of the team

Organization of team

DECISION

They picked best and brightest from the firm

FIVE Tracks

TRACK

o Cisco Information system leader

o Cisco business leader

o Business and IT consultant (Oracle / KPMG)

o Additional personnel from business as team member

o Project Manager

Gauarv Singh 12120 ERP 2

Implementation of Oracle1.CRP0

Training on oracle to understand technical specification of project

Two week training

One small tiger team working on getting application up and running

Result at the end of phase

Some changes are required in product to fulfil the gap

Priority of changes

2.CRP1

Each track to make system work within specific area

Generate detailed documentation for each process/issue/workaround

Finding of gaps

Result at the end of phase

Identified what all modification were required

Standard document to understand the product

Feasibility of product to handle the modification

3.CRP2 and CRP3

Include major modification

Decide on after sales support package

Result at the end of phase

A centralize data warehouse to use all CISCO application

Changed company structure and process according to product

o Renumbered the product

o Changed Bill of material structure

o Changed most of the data according to new system

Green signal to System GO-LIVE

Gauarv Singh 12120 ERP 2

4.GO LIVE

Issue of hardware

Inability of software to handle volume of transaction

Workaround and solution by Team

Responsibility of vendor to solve hardware issue (Didn’t increase cost)

Stress testing was not done which resulted in data leak

All IT team worked together for next two months to solve all technical issues

Key Reason Behind success

1. No.1 agenda for the company, gave priority across all functional area

2. Company believe in standardization

3. Best people across the industry in the project

4. Team organization and culture

5. Systematic and structured approach in selection of vendor and software

6. Correct estimation and high class project management

7. Highly centralized and top to bottom approach by the company

8. Company adaptability changed its process where it was difficult to modify the

software

9. GAP Analysis, except volume testing they did a good gap analysis

Gauarv Singh 12120 ERP 2