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...
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