Supply Chain Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Supply Chain Management - Essay Example Study the networked supply chain concept as implemented by Cisco. What are its strength and weaknesses? The California based network giant, Cisco Systems, Inc was founded in the 1984 by the scientist of Stanford University. The founder Len Bosack and Sandy Lerne along with Richard Troiano designed an operating system for routing data from one computer to another through the operating system called IOS (Internet Operating System) (Cisco-a). This successful venture of Cisco in the world of network made Cisco the giant for the next two decades. Headquartered at San Jose, California the company started operating through a customer support site in the year 1985. Then the company implemented the online service strategy through which the customers are able to download softwares and can update them instantly by downloading the updates from the site. With a massive increase in the number of calls in the support centre from 3000 calls in the year 1991 to 12,000 calls in the year 1992, the comp any successfully implemented their strategy and increased sale to great extent and dealt with large amount of transaction through customer support on its website. In the following year in 1993 Cisco implemented a new strategy to reach out to the global market and grabs the multinational customers through its new Internet based system for the customers. This Internet based support gave clients of Cisco the ability to post their queries in the portal which is directly reviewed by the company. With the success from the Customers Support Site the company launched Cisco Information Online service in the year 1994 for their customer. The customers are now able to view the products available from Cisco and also they can avail the technical support service and customer support from the online portal. In 1995 the company also added their products and services in the site to sell to their customers through application provided in the site which helped the customers to directly buy products or services from their website. The main concept behind this was to eliminating the ideas of paper work, fax, CD-ROM and various other materials for training directly to the web which can be accessed by the clients at any point of time from any parts of the world. This gave the company the opportunity to reduce cost from its employees, trade partners and reduce time for transaction and also increases the market reach at the same time. Farther in the year 1996 Cisco implemented the Networked Strategy for a more interactive approach towards the clients’ relationships. They implemented a new supply chain network which consists of Cisco employees, trade partners, manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors. The orders from the clients are stored in the databases which are accessible by all the members of the company and it is directly connected to the Enterprise Resource Planning system of the company for an easy handling of the stocks and the fast transaction for the customers. For an easy and on-time delivery system the company involved the third party logistics recourses into the system. The logistic providers access the order in the database via internet and can view the status of the order processing information. This direct fulfillment system increased the revenue of the company to a great extent and the company is able to save around $12 million annually with this new strategy implementation. For a more efficient testing process the company