Epicor

With Prophet 21, Epicor provides wholesale distribution customers with an option that supports all durable goods distributors and has some support for sub-verticals within distribution.

The majority of Epicor Prophet 21 small or mid-market distributors are based in North America and the United Kingdom. Epicor supports country localizations and languages for the countries in which their customers have locations. Their current base of support also is spurring growth in Australia/New Zealand and Mexico.

Epicor Prophet 21 began as an on-premises solution, and the company still provides support for this model. However, the product is making a shift to an Azure cloud-based software solution on one common database. Epicor also has a unique offering in the Cloud technology space: a solution called “dedicated tenant.” Customers share the network infrastructure and the application, but each client has a dedicated database. This is an attractive option for customers concerned about the safety and security of their data, particularly those that are involved with governmental contracts. Epicor is seeing 40 to 50 existing customers switch to the cloud each year. Upgrades occur every six months. Epicor tries to push out upgrades in the cloud environment to customers within 120 days of the release.

Epicor’s strategy for Prophet 21 over the last 50 years is to provide a “fit for purpose” approach to its ideal market. This has led to Prophet 21 providing a great depth and width of functionality in its core offering to durable goods distributors. It has allowed Epicor to dive deeply into the functionality required by the sub-verticals in this marketing arena. As a result, it may not be the best option for Food and Beverage or Apparel distribution sub-verticals. For durable goods, it does have some features that support light manufacturing, like kitting, assembly and bill of materials. Epicor Prophet 21 also has a number of complimentary products for which it has pre-built integrations. These include Epicor Commerce Connect to Magento for eCommerce, a service and maintenance module from Epicor, shipping integration with Quickship, document management support through DocStar, and EDI functionality.

One of Epicor Prophet 21’s strengths as a platform is that it provides both software and service. It has professional services and support teams dedicated to Prophet 21. They work closely with customers to learn their unique requirements. Through the use of their extensibility tool set, Epicor allows users to define their unique data fields, use rules to define business logic, and integrate through full API access across the product.

Epicor Prophet 21 prides itself in providing a portal to their customers to share and vote on ideas for functionality improvements. It also has advisory councils created for each sub-vertical, and seeks out membership from their customer’s C-level to provide strategic input.