CRP0The first CRP (CRP0) began with training the implementation team and setting up the technical environment. Here the team worked in two parallel efforts. The first effort focused on getting the team trained on the Oracle applications. Cisco directed Oracle to compress its normal five-day training classed into two 16-hour days. In a two-week period the majority of team members participated in this “immersion” training for the entire application suite. While this was happening, a small “tiger team “was engaged in the second effort, getting the applications up and running. Following training and setup of the system, the core team met in a session designed to quickly configure the Oracle package. Team members from all areas of the company were “locked” together in an off-site meeting to discuss and decide on the appropriate setting for the hundreds of parameters embedded within the software. Team members were joined by specialists from Oracle and KPMG. Solvik described the experience, its intensity and results: There are all these configurable options on how are you going to run the systems. You set literally hundreds of parameters in these applications. So we went off site two days, 40 people, and everybody’s homework assignment was for that off site meeting, maybe three of four weeks into the project at this stage, was come in with an 80-20recommendation on how to configure the system. We met all day and into the night for two days, going down to the “nth-degree” on how we were going to make this thing run for us. Oracle experts, with KPMG experts, with Cisco business people, Cisco IT people, let’s talk about GL, let’s talk about Chart of Accounts, talk about this and talk about that. I call it the 1% effort that gave us 80% accuracy on how we would run this application, as opposed to a typical ERP approach, where you go off for six months, and overanalyze it to death. We had this three to four weeks into the project and we ended up being about 80% accurate in terms of how we could do this. One week after this meeting the team completed CRP0 with a demonstration of the software’s capacity to take a Cisco order all the way through the company’s business process (Quote-to-Cash).An important realization coming out of CRP0 was that Cisco would not be able to adhere to one of its early goals for the implementation—to avoid modification of the ERP software. Avoiding modification was important because changes tend to be firm specific and make migration to future application releases difficult and time consuming. The team‘s experiences during the first phase of the project indicated that without a significant number of changes the software would not be able toEffectively support the company. By the time one month had passed, it was clear that some changes would be required, within two months after that it became clear that some of the changes would be substantial.