Epicor Prophet 21

Advanced Demand Forecasting Module

Advanced Demand Forecasting helps take the guesswork out of ordering the right amount of inventory. Prophet 21 uses an intuitive system of industry-proven weighted averages, standard reports, graphical views, and user-defined formulas to identify the unique demand pattern of every item you stock. Prophet 21 also automatically detects seasonal or trending items.

Consignment Module

Often, customers want their distributors to not only supply them with goods, but manage them, as well. To that end, distributors now offer customers products on consignment, keeping their storerooms fully stocked, but only charging for those items used. Prophet 21 provides the functionality you need to handle consignment contracts.

Distribution Requirements Planning Module

Prophet 21 includes analytics to support purchasing stock now for long-term future requirements. Customer demand forecasts are generated out one year to determine future needs; purchase quantity is then based on need at the anticipated time of receipt of material. Future Stock Analysis Reports in Prophet 21 allow distributors to see the changing stock position of an item over the next year, to help in planning for these future needs.

Inventory Management Module

Inventory sits at the heart of any wholesale distributor’s business. It’s your single biggest investment, and how you handle it can greatly affect your customer service and sales. Prophet 21 enables you to balance your customer service needs while maximizing your return on investment by increasing inventory turns and reducing your inventory investment. Multiple and dynamic inventory replenishment methods provide you with the flexibility to lower carrying costs, minimize excess or obsolete inventory, improve cash flow, and increase customer service levels. In addition, the solution captures information on inventory changes, allowing for accurate data when making purchasing decisions. If you have multiple branches, you can even centralize your inventory with Prophet 21’s regional distribution center inventory management capabilities, enabling you to reduce inventory levels. Cycle counting features confirm inventory counts, and lot and serial number tracking enable you to track stock. Whether you offer this service to just one customer or several, Prophet 21 can handle it.

Purchasing Module

Whether you have one warehouse or dozens, Prophet 21 centralizes the purchasing process, enabling you to optimize buying power and inventory levels. Buyers can qualify the return on promotions or forward buys, allowing you to increase customer service levels in relation to costs and to focus your efforts on items that are earning you the highest profits. A variety of purchasing scenarios, including vendor substitutions, discontinued items, drop ships, and specials, allow you to adjust your processes as your customers’ needs demand, while controlling your costs. In addition, Prophet 21 supports overseas procurement and landed costs associated with buying goods from foreign manufacturers.

Order Automation Module

Regardless of whether your customers enter orders over the phone, online, or in person at your front counter, they want fast, helpful service. Directly tied to your warehouse, order automation allows you to tell customers what is in stock, when new stock is coming in, and even what they ordered in the past. The system will also suggest go-together items to ensure that your customers get everything they need and that you maximize your selling potential. Order automation also enables you to link product information, such as material safety data sheets (MSDS) or product specifications, to item codes and then make those documents immediately available to customers.

Pricing Module

For every product, for every customer, there is a strategic price that produces the optimal gross margin — the highest margin you can obtain while retaining the customer’s business. That price depends on many factors, from the amount of business you do with a customer annually, to an individual item. Epicor takes this highly complex task and simplifies it down to a few keystrokes. The Epicor optional Strategic Pricing module analyzes your database for customer and order information and then classifies your customers by type and size. It then analyzes past purchase history and recommends pricing items by customer and product. Distributors who implement those suggestions have seen a 2 – 4 percent increase in their margins on affected items almost immediately.

Accounts Payable Module

Streamline your accounts payable (AP) processes by directly integrating your inventory receipts and purchase orders. Check processing and payment processes ensure that you don’t lose discounts, and bills are paid on time. Furthermore, you can choose payment types by either vendors or invoices. Rebates are tied directly to order processing for accurate reports so you can maximize the amount of money you earn.

Accounts Receivable Module

Cut your accounts receivable (AR) days with Prophet 21. Track your customers’ outstanding invoices and set alerts when days or balances exceed levels you set. Notes and follow-up capabilities provide a history of conversations to aid your collection efforts. Flexible posting methods make it easy to track whether a check is for multiple invoices, or to consolidate several accounts under one corporate umbrella.

General Ledger Module

A real-time general ledger provides up-to-the-minute financial statements, giving you a better handle on your company’s financial situation as business is transacted, and allowing you to be proactive instead of reactive. Financial reports can be run daily with drill-down capabilities that allow you to access historical information for faster auditing. The real-time general ledger also eliminates laborious day‑, month‑, and year-end closing processes. Plus, multicurrency functionality makes it easier to do business wherever your business partners are located.

Freight Management Module

As more and more distributors acquire material from overseas sources, the process of determining the actual cost of an item becomes increasingly difficult. With out- and in-bound handling costs, freight and broker charges, and international taxes to consider, calculating the total cost of an item means understanding and properly calculating landed costs. The overseas tracking and landed cost functionality provided by Prophet 21 tracks and calculates each of these variables throughout the supply chain — from the manufacturer to your receiving department to your customer’s door — to ensure that you never undercharge for an item, no matter the cost of sourcing the product.

Warehouse Management Module

Of all of the places in your business where inefficient processes can do the most damage to your profitability, your warehouse leads the list. A powerful range of Prophet 21 features manage warehouse activities — including receiving, cross-docking, putaway, picking, inventory adjustments, cycle counts, and much more. Transactions affecting the warehouse are automatically generated and processed without re-keying information — saving time and reducing errors.

Prophet 21 takes a three-pronged approach to Customer Relationship Management (CRM):

The first is sales force automation, where your sales representatives have the lead generation tools to manage their pipeline and up-sell to customers. You can track lead/sales progress by defining opportunities, setting sales stages, and employing a full suite of sales analytics to measure your sales reps’ pipelines.

The second part of the Prophet 21 CRM approach is contact management. This goes beyond maintaining customer addresses and phone numbers, to actually tracking customers’ buying habits so you can anticipate their needs.

Finally, CRM includes marketing capabilities. These include tools that allow you to fax and e‑mail from the solution, generate lead generation call lists, and, most importantly, manage call center activity, enabling you to increase your customer base at a minimal cost.

Automated Backup System

Automated Backup Solution (ABS) provides real-time, off-site data backup storage in our secure location. Coupled with your standard backup procedures, ABS provides the first step in your business continuity plan. All you need is a supported VPN device. Epicor takes care of the rest. In addition, Epicor provides a warm failover solution so you are guaranteed to always be up and running for your customers.

AutoOrder

AutoOrder converts inbound purchase orders from different customers in their own format into standardized structured electronic documents that can be automatically processed into Prophet 21 without needing to be manually keyed. This electronic ordering solution can be easily deployed within minutes, is operating system-agnostic, and leverages a distributor’s existing people, processes, and systems.

Business Analyzer

Epicor Business Analyzer is a business intelligence (BI) solution that summarizes key performance indicators and provides a snapshot of your organization’s health. The application allows you to develop and quickly customize reports for your business, without having to be a report writing expert. Through the familiar Windows interface, you can easily develop the right charts, graphs, and reports to analyze business trends and drill into the details behind the metrics. You can also create alerts that notify you of important events occurring within your business.

Customer Buying Trend Analysis

The Customer Buying Trend Analysis reveals customer/item combinations with a measurable sales trend up or down over 90 days as well as missed buys over a 30 to 60 day period. This module also shows financial impact of customer’s trending buying behavior. The Customer Buying Trend Analysis helps to anticipate customer issues before they make an official change to another distributor and recover revenue that would otherwise have been lost.

Customer Profit Analyzer

Customer Profit Analyzer provides distributors with a true understanding of their total cost to serve for each of their customers. By easily segmenting and grading your customer base according to net profitability and other factors that impact your true cost to serve, you can make business decisions that will prevent unprofitable customers from eroding your margins, while protecting your most profitable relationships.

DynaChange Extensibility Tools

Prophet 21 provides the flexibility you need to tailor the application’s appearance and logic to your company’s needs. With the DynaChange Extensibility Tools, you can create user-defined fields, move or hide fields from screens, create customized portals for each employee, and even write your own business logic to conform to your company’s unique processes, all without affecting the application source code. DynaChange Extensibility Tools ensure the system adapts to your needs, not the other way around.

eCommerce (Web-Based Storefront)

Prophet 21 makes it easy to service existing and prospective customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with its Web-based storefront solution for distributors. In addition, a powerful administrative console allows distributors to keep their site fresh and better manage online content. An integrated Web-based storefront makes it possible for you to service customers as near as next door or as far away as the other side of the world, without making the financial investment of opening a branch or hiring more staff. Your customers can also use your secure Web site as their business system to keep track of what they ordered for their individual customers, and download accounting-specific information, including past invoices, into Microsoft® Excel® spreadsheets — a value-added service that will make them loyal customers for years to come. Because your Web site and ERP solution work from a single database, you’ll receive online orders directly into your distribution ERP system without intervention from your staff, saving time and avoiding costly re-keying errors. This not only increases sales and improves customer service, but also frees your customer service staff to focus on more profitable tasks, such as developing new customers.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

With more and more manufacturers and suppliers requiring distributors to conduct business electronically or face penalties, Prophet 21 streamlines the transaction process by providing a portal for EDI transactions. All transactions are done in real-time, meaning you get the most accurate information available. You also save money because Prophet 21 helps eliminate EDI VAN (Value Added Network) charges when interacting with other Epicor customers. Prophet 21 offers affordable EDI options through on premise and managed services offerings, eliminating all barriers to communicating electronically with trading partners.

Human Capital Management

Epicor Human Capital Management (HCM) provides secure, direct access to employee information and processes, helping you to manage your dispersed workforce, improve human resource processes, and enhance employee satisfaction for greater efficiency and cost savings across the enterprise.

Epicor HCM automates your HR processes, enabling you to track, manage, and analyze all your employee data from application to retirement. Recruitment Management, Benefits, and Absence tracking tools, all within this HRIS application, give you greater control over staffing, time off, and benefits administration, with paperless workflows designed to walk managers and employees through common set up and administration operations for improved efficiency.

Performance Management, Reporting, and Analytics functionality helps you align your corporate goals with employee performance, and empowers you with flexible tools to analyze applicant and employee data for better workforce management.

Available as on-demand software as a service (SaaS), hosted, or on-premise solution, Epicor HCM is HR software that can be deployed as a SaaS HR solution to meet your organizational requirements without compromising functionality or data integrity. To serve your International HR needs, this HRIS Web-based solution configures data fields to reflect the appropriate format based on employee location, as well as providing location-specific home pages delivering relevant communication and corporate standards.

Epicor provides a robust set of flexible and configurable human resource, payroll, and employee development software that:

• Offers greater total business value by streamlining the entire employee life-cycle
  
• Manages recruitment and resourcing, training administration, benefits programs, and performance management
  
• Provides a wealth of information and advice to employees and candidates via direct access;
  
• Promotes operational efficiency by allowing the entire workforce to focus on key company objectives
  
• Flexibility to deploy Epicor Payroll or connect to third party payroll solutions
  
• Delivers powerful business intelligence to enable strategic analysis of key business trends for better planning and informed decision-making
  

Epicor HCM solutions help you maximize the talent within your organization, by providing faster and more efficient people support. With customers in over 150 countries, Epicor understands what it takes to support and manage human resources on a global basis.

Service and Maintenance

For those items that require attention after they’ve left the warehouse, Prophet 21 offers service and maintenance functionality. Service and maintenance helps you keep track of service contracts, preventative maintenance schedules, warranties and more, while monitoring service technicians’ schedules and open service orders. In addition, dispatch functionality helps with the efficient assigning of technician resources. Fully integrated with your distribution ERP system, service and maintenance functionality automates and streamlines everything from tracking serial numbers to processing warranty claims, helping you simplify every step and serve your customers’ needs from point of sale to time of service and beyond.

Strategic Pricing

For every product, for every customer, there is a price that produces the optimal gross margin — the highest margin you can obtain while retaining the customer’s business. What that price is depends on multiple factors, from the amount of business you do with a customer annually to the particular item being ordered. Up until now, determining that right price for every item has been a formidably complex task. With Strategic Pricing, that task becomes as simple as a few keystrokes. Strategic Pricing analyzes your invoice data to determine the best price for each product and order, profiles the predicted, relative sensitivity of products and customers to support price premiums where appropriate, and monitors sales activity for maximum control of exceptions. Implementing strategic pricing can increase your gross margins anywhere from two to four percentage points in the first year alone.

Wireless Warehouse

Developed for Prophet 21, the Wireless Warehouse Management Solution (WWMS) streamlines all warehouse processes — receiving, picking, inventory operations, cycle counting, and adjustments. A small wireless hand-held device communicates with your Prophet 21 solution, sending information about who picks what inventory activity and when, in real-time for accuracy, control, and efficiency. This provides immediate feedback and better control over warehouse tasks. Because the Wireless Warehouse Management Solution is fully integrated with Prophet 21, distributors can implement one technology solution for all of their corporate needs. In addition, since the system offers a graphic user interface, it is user-friendlier than most character-based RF offerings. WWMS Enables distributors to improve customer service by ensuring they get the right products out on time, every time, while improving operating efficiencies through directed warehouse activities.