Cisco How Has Cisco Used

Cisco

How has Cisco used its it infrastructure to drive forward customer intimacy and order fulfillment?

Cisco began with a strategic infrastructure plan that sought to maximize the increasing speeds of the Internet to unify all the functional areas of their company. The four elements of Cisco's business strategy serve as the foundational elements of this strategic infrastructure plan. This infrastructure plan was critical to create an extranet supply chain platform that provided suppliers with accessibility to forecasts and orders. Cisco next used their infrastructure to support the coordination and synchronization of four key areas of their supply chain management system that must execute in synchronization with each other for order fulfillment to be handled effectively. Order management and customer management, demand management integration, supply management and manufacturing management all must be coordinated with one another to ensure order fulfillment is accurate and complete. Customer intimacy is achieved through the continual execution of order fulfillment that meets or exceeds customers' expectations. Cisco relies on an extensive infrastructure to accomplish this long-term objective with successful execution on a daily basis. All of these initiatives are measured on a quarterly basis, specifically focusing on how they contribute to customer satisfaction. Cisco, by integrating legacy systems into a single infrastructure, was able to create and launch five critical Intranet and Internet applications that led to significant re-definition of how customer-facing processes were continually improved in the company.

Consider the $15 million ERP project (that actually cost a lot more), which represented a massive overhaul of systems, legacy applications, and processes, and was successfully completed in 9 months. Over the following 2 years, they spent another $100 million on various web-enablement projects. What benefits were achieved by both the ERP and Web-Enablement initiatives?

Cisco was able to unify all the critical customer-facing processes into a single cohesive strategy for attracting, selling and serving their clients. Completely installing and having an ERP system up and running within nine months is an amazing accomplishment, yet Cisco was forced to do this due to the complete lack of integration between their legacy systems. Creating an extranet for suppliers provided necessary transparency and supply chain visibility for Cisco sales, manufacturing and fulfillment to plan new product introductions more effectively than had been possible in the past. In addition, Cisco launched their first e-commerce website during this period which quickly grew in importance and also provided opportunities for the company to learn extensively about how their products and services would compliment their customers' e-commerce strategies as well. Cisco also concentrated on marketing through the web and supporting the first iterations of Virtual Private Networks (VPN). In short, the ERP and Web-enablement strategies led to many valuable lessons learned for Cisco in creating their new generation networking products.

To what extent does it contribute to the Cisco strategy?

As is the case with their strategic infrastructure plan Cisco defined for the realigning of systems, Cisco also views it as an enabler of business processes first, and a utility second. It is seen as a business process enabler and expected to know not only the key technologies for streamlining processes, it is also expected to know how best to redefine the processes themselves. The concept of it as business analysts who can redefine any number of processes and then re-align systems to support them is the unique role it had at the time at Cisco. Since their success with this approach, it has been emulated widely throughout many industries.

How would you characterize the role of Pete Solvik as CIO? To what extent do you think this affected the success of the projects?