In the following year, little progress was made. Randy Pond, a director in manufacturing3
eventual co-leader of the project, described the dilemma facing the functional areas late 1993: We knew we were in trouble if we did not do something. Anything we did would
just run over the legacy systems we had in place. It turned into an effort to constantly
band-aid our existing systems. None of us were individually going to go out and buy a
package. . . . The disruption to the business for me to go to the board and say “Okay,
manufacturing wants to spend $5 or $6 million dollars to buy a package and by the way
it will take a year or more to get in . .” was too much to justify. None of us was going
to throw out the legacies and do something big.
The system replacement difficulties of functional areas perpetuated the deterioration of Cisco's
legacy environment. Incremental modification continued while the company sustained an 80% annual
growth rate. Systems outages became routine. Product shortcomings exacerbated the difficulties of
recovering from outages.
Finally, in January of 1994, Cisco’s legacy environment failed so dramatically that the
shortcomings of the existing systems could be ignored no longer. An unauthorized method for
accessing the core application database –a workaround that was itself motivated by the inability of the
system to perform--malfunctioned, corrupting Cisco’s central database. As a result, the company was
largely shut down for two days.
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 systems4 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.