Epicor Prophet 21 is an ERP for distributors, allowing companies to manage their supply chain with one ERP, with industry-specific functionality, cloud-based applications to modernize operations, connected ecosystems to ensure visibility across the organization and AI-infused solutions to drive efficiencies.
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Orderhive (discontinued)
Score 3.1 out of 10
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Cin7 Orderhive was a SaaS based solution for order, shipping and inventory management functionalities. Acquired by Cin7 in 2021, it was discontinued in 2023.
Epicor seems to handle order management very well. The process flows from start to finish smoothly and is easy to learn. Regarding service orders and related jobs, the process is not intuitive and is very clunky. Locating all the details of a service order is difficult and definitely requires training from someone experienced with the system to learn how to navigate it. Ensuring everything is entered for billing and/or follow-up needs for service orders isn't always easy, from what I have seen. I don't work much with the service orders side of our operations, but what I have seen has given me the solid impression that there are areas for improvement.
Setting up was covered by a dedicated account rep. It was a smooth and relatively easy process. Problems started a year in when I lost my dedicated account rep. Customer service would refer to the instructions when a question was asked. Sadly they didn't understand the question most of the time.
Around 18 months ago I started conversations with Orderhive as a potential vendor to run a large portion of our ecommerce business. It seemed promising, and the idea that the Plus (now called Enterprise) solution was customisable was the reason I decided to select Orderhive.
There was a significant amount of due-diligence from my end. It took me around 6 months to get my head around what features the software currently had, and what we would need to have Orderhive complete as a customisation.
This in itself was also quite a bit of work - there were a number of revisions to the contract documents, created by a non-technical sales representative. My concerns started around this point when I was unable to speak with a technical representative to discuss, in more detail, how each feature would work.
Some background technologies are still a bit behind the current development technologies in the market.
Only started offering a Web-based front end to Prophet 21 in the past year, and it still has a number of limitations not present in the client-based program
When new iterations/version are released, there are often significant bugs that require opening Support Requests
Epicor (P21) Support is still not the most responsive or efficient
shipping, I would like to be able to handle returns more easily.
I would like to be able to handle stock differently according to order delivery dates. Order hive reserves qty for all the orders we place, I would like to be able to decide which orders reserve stock and which ones shouldn't.
I've used Epicor Prophet 21 for about 12 years (in various iterations). It started out as CommerceCenter by Prophet 21 then became Prophet 21 by Activant and then Prophet 21 by Epicor. So frequently, when a software company is acquired, it stops being great. That has not been the case with Epicor Prophet 21. Over the years they've been under Epicor, the product has just gotten better and better, with major extensibility enhancements and new mobile components coming online.
Too many tabs and hard for users to understand where to click - took a year to get comfortable entering sales orders, and I'm pretty good with technology - I can't imagine for others who aren't as comfortable. Not clear who to go to for help - limited help files, especially for process transactions.
Extremely poor, it is not a user-friendly automated time-saving system like what was promised. It is clunky and the development team is slow and creating very poor and unreliable results.
When hosted locally, you don't have to worry about outages unless the power goes out and the battery backups fail. It can also be hosted in the cloud which is as reliable as your internet connection. There's really no concern for outages in the software by itself. Outages are controlled by external factors.
I do feel like there are some screens and reports that could be streamlined. Prophet 21 likes to load features all at once when going into a program but a quicker load time into order entry, for example, is worth having a little latency while a non-essential tab that doesn't get used very often is opened.
Many times, I am asked the same questions I already put in the case. Or am given a KB to look at that I've already tried. Or other times I do not understand what the technician is asking me to do so I will ask for help repeatedly going back and forth. Contacting us and setting up a call is easiest but sometimes the scheduling takes time and the case just sits there stagnant. They have usually solved most of my cases though
The worst I have ever experienced, they are arrogant, rude and often abusive. They then blame us when we get angry due to the poor quality of the product and the extremely bad customer service.
The on-site training was great. I give it a 9 because the trainer was a chain smoker who had to excuse herself a lot to smoke. Kind of unprofessional. She was a very good trainer though.
I had a great time with the online training. Most of the online trainings were live which meant you had opportunity to interact with instructors. I liked trying to derail them by posting funny comments to the chat window. The only complaint I had about these is they weren't recorded for later use. Well, another complaint is that they were sometimes too short.
The overall implementation is smooth. Prophet 21 sends someone on-site for as many days as you need them to step through the initial implementation. Data conversion is the biggest trick. Make sure you get help with that portion of implementation. Also, be sure to offer plenty of training incentives to keep people coming back for more training. A little money spent up front will save you tons of headaches later.
I have not looked at them in detail, but have received a lot of positive comments through out the industry, we're on the fence in regards to viability of cloud based solutions, but from the information we have received it seems like NetSuite has developed a good solution for the industry.
Sadly I can't give Cin7 Core a review, because they haven't been able to resolve connection issues and it's been 3 months. But I'm done with this company
Prophet 21 is very reliable. The database is robust and well designed. The application is also hard to break. If there's one feature I don't like, it's that they haven't accounted for the dreaded single quote. That's kind of the bane of Microsoft SQL's existence. They need to escape that character in every field that will accept it in the system. Otherwise, the system throws all kinds of errors and many times will crash.
There has been a negative ROI in this case. Not only have we paid a deposit toward the customisation of our orderhive implementation, there has also been a massive sunk cost of approximately 18 months of my time and effort.
