You survived the Epicor Prophet 21 ERP implementation, congrats!  Deploying a new ERP system is a daunting task, and some companies never make it over the finish line.  Once the implementation consultants have left your building, you are on your own.  It’s time for you and your team to start getting some return on investment.

Chances are, your implementation wasn’t perfect.  Most of them are not.  This happens because the time and cost of deployment starts to get out of hand.  At this point, you usually start sacrificing your wants and wishes to keep the timeline and budget from going into a death spiral.  The focus turns to “just go live” and data quality often suffers.

Today we are going to talk about 5 things you should be focusing on getting right if you want to increase time-to-value with your Prophet 21 ERP investment

1. Get Your Purchase Pricing Correct

Purchase pricing is a foundational issue in your Prophet 21 ERP deployment.  If it isn’t right, everything else is going to be a struggle.  The amount of re-work and process sluggishness will be exponentially higher if purchase pricing is not dialed in for most of your product offering.

To deal with this, learn to use the pricing service, at least for item updates.  Get yourself in a position where you can quickly take an Excel spreadsheet from a supplier, and turn it into a pricing service update file.  The key fields to get right, at a minimum, are list price, supplier cost, and supplier part number.  Other fields are good too, but these three are critical.  Make sure your purchase pricing is pulling from the right field in Supplier Pricing Maintenance.

Keep it simple at first.  If you have complex supplier pricing models, do the heavy lifting in Excel and just get good costing into P21.  You can set costs by location, or have 1 cost apply to all locations.  You can always come back and build the complex pricing pages and discount structures in the future.  Focus on the basics first.  When you enter a PO, you want the right cost to populate every time.  It is how trust is build with the users.

2. Get a Basic Sales Pricing Strategy in Place

Decide on a solid strategy to get a good default sales price to populate during order entry.  Also establish a fall back “if all else fails” price library that assures you will make an acceptable margin if there is a gap in your sales pricing libraries.  I recommend a fall back price structure designed to calculate a multiplier against cost.  For instance, if you want to have a fall back margin of 30%, then set the multiplier to 1.43.

This library can be set as the bottom priority as a safety net to make sure you are making money and no rogue selling prices get out there that will cause you to lose ground.

There are many other aspects of sales pricing to consider, but having a safety net underneath it all is a good play.

3. Learn About Prophet 21 ERP Job/Contract Pricing

If you have customers with a set price or a special deal on certain items, job/contract pricing is your friend.  Contract pricing helps you in a few ways.  First, you are taking pricing errors largely out of the equation for these items & customers.  Second, you can speed up order entry by just releasing from the contract instead of keying in the same items over and over

You can upload the contracts into P21 and get your pricing, max quantities, and other key information settled ahead of time.  This allows you to move quickly and accurately through the sales order entry process.

4.  Learn to use Previous Requests

If you have customers buying the same thing over and over again, then Previous Requests will save you a ton of time.  Previous requests is a feature in Prophet 21 ERP order entry.  It allows you to look back at items bought by the customer in the past.  You can filter by date range, previous order number, a quote, items, product groups, customer part number, etc.  P21 will then give you a list of all matching items with the quantity and price paid.  You can use a check box (and edit quantity/price if needed) to quickly add items to the order.  For the right kind of customer, this is a huge feature to help the order entry process.

5. Use DynaChange Designer for Order Entry

One of the great things about the Prophet 21 ERP system is the DynaChange Designer.  This is the feature that allows you to add, move, and hide elements on the screen.  Spend some time getting the Order Entry screen dialed in just the way your team likes it.   Move all of your key header fields forward to the main tab.  This avoids constant click from tab to tab.  Move the fields around at the line level to get them sorted out in the way your team is used to.  These little things will go a long way to improving system usability.

Bonus Tip:  Do the same thing on the PORG items tab.

Wrapping It Up

These are not the only 5 things you need to do after deploying Prophet 21 ERP.  There are many other things you need to consider as well.  Streamlining shipping and receiving, setting up replenishment, and getting reporting squared away are big ticket items too.  However, these 5 items are very close to your customer, and will go a long way to making sure that your user and customer experience is solid in the early days of your P21 deployment.