www.softwareview.com/thesof57.htm -
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Published on: 11/26/2000
Last Visited: 3/14/2007
Justin Fox writes, "Sit with Larry Carter, who was Chief Financial Officer in 1999, in his little office on the top floor of Cisco's headquarters in San Jose, California, and you see, with astonishing clarity, an entire corporation arrayed out before you.
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With a couple of mouse clicks and a password, CFO Carter can call up his company's revenues, margins, orders, discounts given on those orders, and top ten customers - all for the previous day."Could I actually get earnings per share (EPS) in one day?"Carter asks rhetorically.
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All of this use of the Internet has enabled Cisco to shorten the time it needs to close its accounting and financial books at the end of each quarter; from the ten days it took when Carter first joined the company four years ago to one day now - while cutting spending on finance from two percent of sales to one percent.Carter had focused initially only upon the end-of-quarter close; he thought shortening the closing period would result in more reliable numbers and cut the amount of time his staff spent on bookkeeping."Then it sort of struck me last year that in order to have it in one day, you had to have the information all the time anyway," he says."Then you start thinking, 'This gets kind of interesting.'"
Thanks to this "virtual close," as Carter likes to call it, he and CEO John Chambers can detect changes in market conditions almost instantly."A year ago we saw an uptick in countries in Europe that had been flat, and we authorized accelerated hiring there long before any of our competitors did," Carter says.Remember those daily figures that Carter gets on orders, margins, and discounts?If he sees someone landed a big order, he may send congratulations."Everyone in the sales organization knows that John and I look at this every day," Carter says.