Cisco Case

What did they do wrong?

Founded by two Stanford graduates, Cisco would be the third dominant company-joining Microsoft and Intel to shape the digital revolution. Unfortunately the road to success wasn’t always smooth. In 1995 Cisco compelled to implement ERP, proceeding without a formal economic justification. The project would cost $15 million dollars in 1994 and what I believe is equivalent to $45 million dollars in 2015. The project would constitute as the single largest capital project approved by the company. This created a confusion and without a high-level sponsorship Cisco’s team aimed to make steering committee meetings on the fly. One of the issues with the new ERP was at the time a carton was being filled, it was not allowing a barcode scanning to record contents of each box. It should assign a box with a tracking number and prompts the product for a serial number entry then the serial number should have been stored for future use and to prevent issuance of duplicates. From there the gutted over to Oracle. The problem was there on time ship, shipping on the date they commit to the customers fell from 95 percent to about 75 percent.

How did they manage unanticipated problems?

With the help of its vendors, working together, stabilized and added capacity to the system. The solutions started to come from top-down. The new leaders for Cisco expanded from its core 20 members to about 100, representing a cross-section of Cisco’s business community. The problems were being dealt with by management of the best and the leaders handpicked the best and the brightest and people want to join because it was an opportunity of a life time. With the different sections such as: software, Hardware, System Integration, and Head Count-Cisco wanted to excel and be a giant like Intel & Microsoft. With a new team structure starting with the Executive down to the end user Cisco had a process in which looks respectable and ensures things will get done in a proper form.