Why Epicor Prophet 21
An Epicor customer since 2015, the company had first operated on a home-grown system in the nineties. As they hit the next decade of growth, in the early 2000’s the company realized it wasn’t a system that they could grow with.
They next chose an ERP Platform that was mainstream. However, it came with a cost; changes to the system required outside consulting help which proved to be expensive. Managing and maintaining the system also required a bigger internal IT team, especially as they were simultaneously growing through acquisitions. The IT team spent the majority of their time just keeping it alive. “We weren’t able to focus the majority of our IT resources on strategic advantage kinds of projects,” says Phillip Hall, Director of Information Services.
Focus on the Business of Distribution, not IT
In researching the industry for a standard ERP solution, Hall had the following criteria in mind. “We looked around the industry and wanted to invest in a system that reflected best practices, wouldn’t require a ton of IT support, and would free us up to spend time on things that differentiated us in our chosen markets. With Prophet 21 we live different lives as IT people; we are no longer firefighters. The system stays on all by itself and with relatively minor care and feeding, we’re able to use it to do the things the business requires. We can even extend it to do fancy things using the industry-standard skills we already have. We have been able to automate and build processes in an upgrade-safe way and that is driving additional ROI as time goes on.”
Bringing Unique Aspects of the Business to the ERP system
The Womack team are big users of the business rule system that Epicor Prophet 21 has. The development team can write their own business rules and customizations in an upgrade safe way. “The business rules extensibility system is one of our favorite features,” says Hall. “Our users are pretty technologically demanding; they bring us things all the time. They’ll say something like ‘when we click this button, we want this magic to happen. Can you do that?’ Thankfully, due to the way that business rules are set up, we can usually say yes. Our small development team has created several dozen rules that implement custom Womack business logic. In some cases, we’ve even extended business workflows outside of the ERP to mobile devices and the web using various subscription-based freight and messaging APIs. This ability to customize the ERP without breaking it or locking us into a specific version is great, says Hall.
User Group Community
The team has also benefited from participation in the Epicor Prophet 21 North Texas User Group community and learned about other capabilities of the system and appreciate the close relationship the community has with the Epicor Prophet 21 product team to provide input to the product roadmap.
The Road Ahead
“We estimated an expected ROI of about 75% or IRR of about 19% annual return over 8 years (our estimated life of an ERP). We have actually done better as our IT cost to support Prophet 21 has been lower than we anticipated. We also do not foresee a need to replace Prophet 21 in the future. As Prophet 21 has evolved and grown with us, positive returns on our investment are expected well beyond 8 years,” says James Templer, Controller for Womack Machine Supply.
Over the coming months, the company is focused on bringing acquisitions into the fold using courses within Epicor University to kick-off the training. One of their acquisitions has retail counter sales, which is newer to Womack. They are confident that Prophet 21’s robust counter sales capability will set them on a path to success.
