Cisco’s struggle to recover from this major shutdown brought home the fact that the company’s
systems were on the brink of total failure.
Solvik, Pond, and a number of other Cisco managers came
to the conclusion that the autonomous approach to systems replacement they had adopted was not
going to be sufficient. An alternative approach was needed. Solvik described what they did:
We said, “we can’t wait casually by while Order Entry, Finance, and Manufacturing go out
and make three separate decisions.” It would take too long to get those applications in place.
We needed to take faster action. At that point we got sponsorship from the SVP of
Manufacturing, Carl Redfield. He was with Digital before Cisco, in PC manufacturing. He
took the lead and said, “O.K., let’s get on with this.… let’s start from the manufacturing
perspective, and see if we can get the Order Entry and Financial groups in the company
interested in doing a single integrated replacement of all the applications, instead of taking a
longer time doing separate projects.” And so in February, about a month after the [company
shutdown], we went about putting together a team to do an investigation to replace the
application.
Redfield understood from previous large-scale implementation experiences at Digital how
“monolithic” IT projects could take on lives of their own. He echoed Solvik’s concerns about project
size and had strong views about how Cisco should approach a large implementation project.
I knew we wanted to do this quickly. We were not going to do a phased implementation,
we would do it all at once. We were not going to allow a lot of customization either. There is a
tendency in MRP systems5 for people to want the system to mirror their method of operation
instead of retraining people to do things the way the system intended them. This takes a lot
longer. Also, we wanted to create a schedule that was doable and make it a priority in the
company as opposed to a second tier kind of effort.