Cisco ERP Case Study Cisco Case Study

The Cisco Board of Directors had to vote and approve of the plan. ERP installations are not just a large it project. They are instead a complete re-examining of the company's business model and a re-defining of interprocess communication and the defining of process conduits between systems. In short, Cisco completely re-architected the core business processes that their company was based on, down to the Bill of Materials (BOM) used for managing their production operations.

As the company completed the multi-phased implementation plan for getting the ERP system up and running, the decision was made to also get a data warehouse in place and functioning. The data warehouse would give the company, for the first time ever, an opportunity to have all enterprise applications using the same data set, for the first time. Having a single data warehouse significantly improved accuracy of key processes including quote-to-cash over the long-term. This was a first for Cisco, as they had never been able to use the same database across all enterprise applications in the past. Cisco also ran into scalability on their hardware purchased specifically for the ERP implementation, and due to a unique clause in their contract, was able to get the hardware provider to install servers that could scale more efficiently to support the transaction load. This is a second area that Cisco had never been able to accomplish before, which was the scalability of all company transactions on a single application.With the enterprise-wide ERP system this also became possible for the first time.

In conclusion, the key elements of the it architecture that allowed Cisco to accomplish these strategic it objectives was first the decision to move away from a fragmented, disconnected it strategy based on legacy systems that could not scale with their existing business. The use of a centralized ERP system to consolidate critical process steps in their quote-to-cash workflows were also critical and not possible until there was a single enterprise-wide system in place. Third, the allowances made for scalability within the ERP system, database supporting the ERP system and the hardware was a critical lesson learned in attaining the strategic objectives of the cut-over from legacy systems to the Oracle ERP….....