Badm 7050 - Cisco Case Study Assignment

Lawrence Villermin                                                                

Nov. 26th, 2015

BADM 7050

Information Systems

Cisco Case Study Assignment (Week 5)

Dr. Andrew Schwarz

Cisco was highly successful with its enterprise resource planning (ERP) effort. What accounts for this success? What were the most important things that Cisco did correctly? At the very beginning of the project Cisco understood the importance of building a strong team.  The fact that Cisco brought in only the most knowledgeable and experienced team members is the main reason for the success of the project.  The strength of the team gave it the ability to make split second decisions to complete the project. A second reason for the overall success of the project was getting senior management support and approval.  The designers of the project brought the concept to, not only company management, but to the board of directors for support.  Having the approval from that high up gives the company and everyone working on the system the understanding that this project is very important and the success of it will benefit the company.  Having the executives that were ready to embrace the large ERP system gave the team an idea of where to begin in the selection process.  Knowing that the legacy system was failing gave the team a great place to start in the team building. Construction of the team was imperative to the integration of the ERP application. Another factor was the selection of the integration partner, KPMG and software vendor, Oracle. KMPG was chosen because of their technical skills as well as business knowledge. Oracle was chosen they were motivated to make the project as success. With these two companies on board, as successful implementation was in the near future. 

Did Cisco do anything wrong on this project? If so, what?  As it is stated in the case the team did not fully load test this system.  Doing a system check on the database not under full load did nothing to prove the overall ability of the system, although the test proved the one sector was functional without bugs did nothing to validate the entire system.  As was mentioned in the case, “it was clear where the company had gone wrong it is final testing of the system”.  If a fully loaded function test had been performed it may have led to less delays and a quicker “to market” timing.

Cisco went live with ERP in a big bang fashion, which is inherently risky. How did Cisco mitigate this risk?  Putting the team together and taking 75 days to implement after a two day total outage gives light to the fact that the company felt strongly about this improvement project.  Taking 75 days to implement after the company crashed was a lifetime to the company executives for fear of another outage.  A lot was riding on the success of this project and the executives in charge were well aware of this.  The first approach was to increase the team from 20 to over 100 members.  This team was comprised of “a cross section of cisco’s business community”.  Secondly taking those team members out of the normal work place and sending them “off-site” and locking them together in a meeting to discuss and decide was mitigation used by Cisco.  Integrating vendor representation in the meeting helped the team to understand the needs and wants of the company.