Cisco Systems, Inc.: Implementing ERP

Cisco Systems, Inc.: Implementing ERP The root cause of issue with the outdated ERP system ended up being exactly what they instilled into the Oracle system yet no red flags were raised. Before CRP0 was complete, the team had already broken one of its main goals of not modifying the new ERP. Their key was to setup Cisco operations to work with the ERP system so that fluctuations in scale wouldn’t have any adverse effects as they had experienced with UNIX. Instead, they made the same cardinal sins of modifying the Oracle system to meet Cisco’s way of business. In altering Oracle, they placed a ceiling on the scalability of the new system without realizing it and this should have been discussed further with more emphasis being placed on changing internally to meet Oracles structure. With Cisco installing their “most seasoned personnel” on the team, CRP3 tests should have been handled differently. The Cisco team fooled no one but themselves by defining their CRP3 trials as “full system” encompassing. Cisco ran their key processes consecutively separate versus all of them running at the same time in their tests. To exacerbate the issue or hide the weakness, depending on which way you look at it, Cisco also only opted to test these separate processes with a “partial info. load”! How this could be accepted as fully operational is incomprehensible. With the amount of experience on the team, Cisco should have foreseen the problems they experienced. How this thinking and mindset went as far as it did should be studied further to prevent these critical miscues in future ERP implementation sites.
Cisco realized and sought to execute a radical process redesign which can be technically defined as business process reengineering. I saw this as the ideal application for BPR due to the nature of Cisco needing to run cross-functional processes in Oracle. I believe the internal resistance that comes with BPR was mitigated by selecting key players for the implementation team, which