Heavy Involvement from Business Community and Cisco Management

Heavy involvement from business community and Cisco management:

        Cisco made sure that the new ERP implementation will not just be an IT initiative. Instead, it made sure that there is a critical involvement of the business community and the Cisco management. A steering committee comprising high level executives of Cisco, KPMG and Oracle was formed to monitor the project. This helped Cisco to make sure that the ERP implementation process was in line with the business goal.

Right integration partner and vendors:

        Cisco also chose a right integration partner KPMG and the software vendor Oracle. KPMG has experienced people in relevant domains working for their clients. Also Cisco consciously made a decision to work with Oracle keeping in view the scale of the project. This helped them to closely work with them to address their business needs.

Focused on causes rather than impact of ERP implementation:

        Cisco focused its decision making on factors that led towards newer ERP rather than the impact it is expected to have. This helped cisco to address its real business problems. The two day shutdown at cisco earlier, persuaded the company to go for entirely newer ERP system in full fledge rather than upgrading the existing system.

Involvement of senior management and functional heads:

        A large part of the successful implementation of the ERP was attributed to the involvement of the senior management. Also all the functional teams were kept in loop to make sure the ERP implementation is aligned with the business process followed at cisco. The management decided to implement what they needed rather than what they were offered. They also wanted to make sure that the ERP must be compatible for any migration into new applications in future. Everybody in the company was made aware about the project and its priority.