Cisco also had reason to believe that Oracle was particularly motivated to make the project a success. Pond provided his impression of Oracle’s situation: “Oracle wanted this win badly. We ended up getting a super deal. There are, however, a lot of strings attached. We do references, allow site visits and in general talk to many companies that are involved in making this decision.” The Cisco project would be the first major implementation of a new release of the Oracle ERP product. Oracle was touting the new version as having major improvements in support of manufacturing. A successful implementation at Cisco would launch the new release on a very favorable trajectory. From inception to final selection the Cisco team had spent 75 days. The final choice was team based. Solvik described how the decision was mad and presented to the vendors: The team internally mad the choice and informed the vendors. There was no major process we had to go through with management to “approve” the selection. We just said “Oracle you won, [other vendor] you lost.” Then we went on to contract negotiations with Oracle and putting a proposal together for our board of directors. The focus immediately turned to issues of how long the project would take, and how much it would cost. The team decided “yes, we will do this and we ought to go forward with the project.” So now at the very end of April we were putting the whole plan together.Going to the BoardBefore going to the board for approval, the team needed to answer two very important questions: How much would it cost and how long would it take? They knew their executives were worried that big project might spin out of control and deliver sub-standard results. Despite the risks, the team took pragmatic approach to estimating project requirements. Solvik described the process: Our quarters go August to October, November to January, February to April, and May to July. So right here on May 1, beginning of the fourth quarter, we are asking “how long should it take to do a project to replace all of our core systems?” This is truly how it went. We said “you know we can’t implement in the fourth quarter. The auditors will have a complete cow.” If it takes a year we will be implementing fourth quarter, and that won’t work. We thought it really should take 15 months, July or August a year later. Tom Herbert, the program manager, said there’s no way we are going to take 15 months to get this done. That’s ridiculous. So we started going in the opposite direction and said well can we do it in five months? That just didn’t seem right. Understand we did not have a scope yet. In the end we basically settled that we wanted to go live at the beginning of Q3, so we would be completely stable for Q4(See Exhibit 2 for a summary of milestone ERP implementation dates.)That took care of setting a target date. Next came the task of estimating a project budget. Once again, Cisco was aggressive: “After we set a date, we estimated budgets. We put this whole thing together without really being that far into this program. We just looked at how much it touched” (Pete Solvi). Instead of developing a formal business case (i.e., a financial analysis) to demonstrate the impact that the project would have on the company, the team chose to focus on the issues that had sparked the analysis in the first place. In Solvik’s view, Cisco had little choice but to move. He explained his approach to the situation: We said that we had this big outage in January. That we were the biggest customer of out current software vendor and that the vendor was being bought by another company. It was unclear who was going to support our existing systems and we needed to do something. The reliability, the scalability and the modifiability of our current applications would not support our anticipated future growth. We evaluated those three alternatives, talked about the pros and cons of each alternative, and recommended that we replace our system, big-bang, with one ERP solution; we committed to do it in nine months for $15 million for the whole thing. (See Exhibit 3 for a breakdown of project costs.)Although Cisco was, to some extent, compelled to implement ERP, proceeding without a formal economic justification was also a matter of management philosophy.