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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SAP Cloud ERP (SAP S/4HANA Cloud)
Score 8.6 out of 10
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SAP Cloud ERP (SAP S/4HANA Cloud) is a modular, cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that brings embedded AI into core business processes to help organizations improve productivity, efficiency, and scalability. It supports critical business functions including finance, supply chain, human resources, and sales, while providing industry best-practice processes, predictable subscription-based costs, and the ability to add capabilities, users, and functionality as…
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.
SAP Cloud ERP is best suited for medium- to large-sized organizations seeking scalability, real-time insights, and standardized processes. It will help them streamline financial operations & core HR functions, optimize inventory management & procurement process. Its intelligent automation will help them automate repetitive, routine tasks and use machine learning for predictive analysis.
The software helps in forecasting and identifying potential challenges that would affect our organisation in the near future. This enables us to prepare in advance and also adopt practical and viable measures.
It enables faster and accurate data processing, which enhances decision-making.
It's easily customizable according to specific organizational needs. This promotes overall efficiency and productivity of the organization.
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
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.
The cost of SAP as an ERP is quite high and the switching costs associated with ERP systems are even higher. That being said moving from one ERP to another only happens once in a great while for large organizations. Those switching costs include retraining, IT hardware requirements, outside consultants and more
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.
SAP Cloud ERP is a useful solution for automating and streamlining business processes. It offers modern technologies such as built-in AI, machine learning, and real-time data analytics. It offers multi-currency, multi-language support to manage international operations smoothly. It comes with a modern, role-based user interface that enhances your user experience and lets you perform tasks smoothly.
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 support system I find great as whenever I run into problems they rectify them quickly as possible they never reacted late the support is just up to the mark for me. They provide many solutions to the problems I faced the [technical] team support is always amazing they [listen] to mean work accordingly.
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.
SAP requires a lot of internal and external resources to complete its successful implementation. The cloud version requires a deeper understanding of the different capabilities of the local systems (hardware) and the connection towards your local IT team. We found several problems on our systems that we couldn't foresee before the implementation and roll out.
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.
The platform utilizes advanced predictive analytics to anticipate operational bottlenecks and put them out of commission before the problems become larger. We can proactively develop effective strategies that help keep service quality in the face of unexpected changes in the market, or external disruptions, by continuously analyzing historical performance data as well as elements of the current market
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.
