We’re Live! Now What? A Practical Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Epicor® Prophet 21®

You’re Live on Prophet 21! Now What?

Whether you went live last week, last month, last year, or several years ago, there are a number of things you can do to get the most out of your system. Like many P21 users, you have probably spent a lot of time and effort getting ramped up on the new system. Now that you are up and running, it is important to keep the momentum going by developing a timeline for leveraging additional features and processes that will have the greatest impact on improving your business. The following pages outline our recommendations for getting the most out of your Prophet 21 investment. The suggestions are based on a two-year roadmap that can take your company from an average user to a “power distributor.” Being a power distributor means you are able to consistently outperform other distributors in your market while receiving a significant return on your investment in the form of increased sales and margins, decreased costs, and better customer service. At Epicor, our job is to help you achieve your profitability potential, so please let us know how we can assist in solving business issues with our technology and services.

How To

Use this Guide Choosing Priorities and Marking Your Calendar We do not expect you’ll be able to accomplish every item at every checkpoint. Work with your management team to decide which items are most critical to advancing your business. Be sure to plan adequate time and resources for execution with full management backing.

Did You Know? These interesting facts or “hidden” features can improve your knowledge of Epicor and your Prophet 21 system. Recommendations in this guide that pertain to the LMS will have a special icon next to them. Epicor strongly recommends you continue to utilize the LMS, postimplementation, in order to better educate your staff and drive costs out of your business.

Customer Tips Learn from those who have already been down this road! Throughout this piece, an Epicor customer offers their recommendation for how to get the most out of your Epicor partnership.

Utilization Meter Your company’s goal is to get the most out of your Prophet 21 system. The following pages contain a utilization meter that displays how close you are to becoming a “power distributor”… if you follow the suggestions at each checkpoint. Think of a power distributor as one whose sales per employee, gross margin percentage, customer service levels, and other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are superior to other distributors in their market.

Important! This guide assumes that your organization will continue to subscribe to the Learning Management System (LMS) that you used to educate your employees during implementation. The LMS contains a growing library of courses on new and advanced features of the system. In addition, it is a great tool for crosstraining employees in different aspects of your business and has resources you can use to test on knowledge of your company’s processes, product lines, service and sales skills, and so on.

We’re Live! Now What? A Practical Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Epicor Prophet 21

| 3

Immediate Action Items

1. Gather Feedback from Your Management Team You are now live on your Prophet 21 system with at least a couple of successful month ends completed. At this stage, we recommend a thorough review with your management team. Below are some questions you will want to ask of everyone:

†† Do your teams know how to find what they need? Staff who interact with customers on a daily basis need the proper support to answer any questions thrown their way. Are they aware of information available in reports and drill-downs?

2. Determine Priorities for the Next Year Prior to implementation, your team probably had a lot of great ideas for new processes. Don’t lose sight of those objectives! Gather feedback and put together a plan for the upcoming year. Review this guide with your management team and come to a consensus on the items that will have the greatest impact on your business, and commit to executing on those. At the same time, be sure to avoid the most common excuse: “We don’t have time to do that.” You will find that the rewards for doing this far outweigh the time invested.

†† Do your teams need access to better information? Do existing reports need to be modified? What reports still need to be created to access, interpret, and act upon critical business data? Keep in mind that Epicor has report writing experts who can assist with everything from basic to advanced report writing needs.

†† What processes do your teams struggle with? Verify that your employees have the necessary knowledge and tools to execute their jobs and control processes going forward. Have an application consultant come onsite and address existing process issues while sharing best practices with your organization.

Establish a relationship with your Customer Account Manager immediately. This person will be your liaison to all things Epicor for the life of your business partnership. When you have obstacles in your path, they can recommend resources to help you achieve your goals and properly budget for items on your roadmap. They can also point you to other distributors who have overcome similar challenges.” Rene Savage, Vice President of Technology | Stellar Industrial Supply

3. Develop a Business Continuity Plan If there is any recommendation in this guide that should NOT be ignored, it is this: don’t wait another day to develop a comprehensive business continuity plan. Your system data is your lifeblood. Protecting that data and having failover solutions for critical business applications can be the difference between thriving and going out of business.

4. Develop Your LMS Plan

†† R  egular testing of a restore from both onsite and offsite backups

During your implementation, some training courses assigned to employees may have been skipped or not completed. By go-live all employees should have a solid understanding of the Prophet 21 system as it pertains to their job function. To review employees’ current training activity, you can search by assigned or completed courses, tasks, or tests. Keep the training momentum going by encouraging employees to complete assigned training activities or to look for new courses that may have recently been added to the LMS that pertain to their role. Instructions on how to access this type of information can be found in the LMS Administrator’s Guide found on the Epicor Customer Website.

†† A crisis management plan that is available to all employees

1. Select “Assignments” from the main navigation

Epicor offers an Automated Backup and Disaster Recovery service that allows you to have the peace of mind that your system can be operational within hours and would run on our servers for as long as it would take to get your locations up and running again.

2. Select “Search”

Your business continuity strategy should account for the following: †† Regular onsite and offsite backups to a secure location

3. For “Search Type” select “Courses” and “Tasks” 4. For “Status” select “Not Started” and “In Progress” 5. Click the “Search” button at the bottom of the page Results can be sorted by employee or department and exported to Excel for review. Be sure to reassign all incomplete courses to employees with a due date within the next two months.

Did You Know? Every week hundreds of thousands of hard drives crash in the United States. However, the majority of data lost is not by a natural disaster. Only a small percentage of small and medium sized companies that suffered from a catastrophic data loss are able to stay in business—the majority either never open or close within two years. Time to recover is critical as many businesses cannot survive in the long term if their data is not recovered within 24 hours. Having a plan in place that is tested periodically will help your company’s survival rate if such an unfortunate event occurs.

We’re Live! Now What? A Practical Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Epicor Prophet 21

| 5

Checkpoint:

Three Months After Go-Live

1. Review Business Alerts and Portals Workflow alerts in Prophet 21 allow everyone in your organization to quickly respond to changing business events. They reduce the number of phone calls and faxes, and improve response time to customers and vendors. They make your business proactive (not reactive), and therefore, more efficient. Now is a good time to review if alerts have been optimized for your business. Common alerts that sometimes get overlooked include: †† A  lerting a customer when their item ships, along with a tracking number †† A  lerting the sales rep and sales manager when an order falls below a profit target †† A  lerting a credit manager when an order goes on hold, then alerting the original order taker when the order is released from hold †† A  lerting the sales rep when a quote is approaching its expiration date †† A  lerting the customer about related items that other customers purchased when they buy an item from a specific product group An Epicor application consultant can help determine which alerts can have the greatest impact on your business productivity and profitability. These engagements can take place via the Web, making this a cost-effective solution that can be implemented immediately.

2. Preparing to Become a Power User With more than 200 courses available as a part of your LMS subscription, it is safe to say that your employees have only had an opportunity to take a portion of these during the implementation. Now is a good time to revisit the available courses that will help improve your employees’ knowledge of the Prophet 21 system, streamline daily business processes, and cross-train employees in different roles. There are a number of intermediate to advancedlevel courses that those who have completed their initial training curriculum could consider taking on as the next step in becoming a power user. You may even consider establishing a career advancement program as employees progress through the courses and tests available with the LMS.

Don’t miss Insights, Epicor’s annual users conference, under any circumstances! In fact, be sure to send multiple people from your organization. The conference takes place each spring and it’s your best opportunity to gain knowledge on how to advance your distribution business. The education and networking opportunities are unparalleled, and you’ll get to form relationships with Epicor staff responsible for building and enhancing your solutions. The return on investment is immediate, thanks to all the answers and ideas you’ll bring back to the office.” Ed Albers, Director of Operations | Machinery Tooling & Supply

3. Take Advantage of DynaChange™ Designer and Navigator DynaChange Designer, included with your Prophet 21 software, allows you to alter the appearance of screens to suit the needs of your employees and business processes. This allows you to improve process flows for various functional areas within Prophet21 including: Order Processing, Accounting, Purchasing and Production Order Processing. You also have the option to pull information from other tabs to one master view and even setup field security so that sensitive information is protected from those without the proper authority to view or edit it. In addition, you can create user defined fields to track information vital to your operations.

4. Opt-In for E-mail Alerts from the Epicor Customer Web Site Be sure you never miss important news about product enhancements, support advice, educational opportunities, free events taking place online, and more. By opting in for automatic e-mail alerts, every time a newsflash is posted to the Epicor Customer Web Site home page, you get an e-mail containing that important information. Have your employees sign in to the Web site and click the link on the home page for “Automatic Alerts” (next to the “Recent Customer News” heading). They can select the categories for which they would like to receive proactive alerts.

DynaChange Navigator allows you to create your own drill downs from any field in the system to information on another screen, providing quicker access to the information each user requires. Proper implementation of DynaChange Designer and DynaChange Navigator can reduce errors and eliminate unnecessary keystrokes from your processes. Features such as single document interface, improved icons, productivity ribbon, history tracking, tab features and additional themes assist in improving the interface and processing for the end user. These productivity enhancements help reduce costs for customizations, eliminate errors, save time and build efficiencies into your processes. Contact your Customer Account Manager for more information.

Did You Know? The DynaChange Extensibility Series are optional modules that provide incredible power over the Prophet 21 application to further cut costs, eliminate errors, save time, and build efficiencies into your processes: • D  ynaChange Portals allows you to create views and interactive dashboards of real-time data that is specific to each user’s needs • D  ynaChange Rules allows you to create business logic within Prophet 21 that adheres to your company’s unique processes and workflows without the need for custom software

We’re Live! Now What? A Practical Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Epicor Prophet 21

| 7

Checkpoint:

Six Months After Go-Live

1. Develop a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Strategy Generally speaking, there are three aspects of a good CRM strategy: contact management, sales force automation, and marketing. For each of these, your management team should decide how to best apply the powerful CRM capabilities within Prophet 21 to meet your business objectives. †† D  evelop metrics and processes for customer satisfaction and retention, such as customer inactivity reports and e-mail alerts for “at risk” customers †† A  utomate sales and marketing communications, including new customer thank-you letters, and establish a sales document library †† M  anage sales opportunities, with a focus on improving lead-to-close ratios and accuracy of forecasts †† T ake advantage of Outlook integration, including integrating contacts, e-mails, tasks, and appointments for your sales reps †† P erfect your customer and contact records, with a focus on organizing contact roles, classes, sales territories, lead source information, and prospect qualification To get an idea of your system’s CRM capabilities, review the courses in the Customer Relationship Management directory of the LMS course catalog. Epicor offers a three-day consulting engagement with an application and distribution expert who can help set your vision and teach your company best practices for implementing Prophet 21’s CRM features in accordance with your businesses goals.

2. Add Lean and Six Sigma Specialization As you continue to learn the value Prophet 21 can bring to your company, you may want to find additional ways to avoid waste and improve current processes. One way to do this is to assign some key players in your company to become proficient in Lean and Six Sigma. You can register through the LMS for a Lean and Green Belt Certification course. This live training course combines lecture, interactive activities, and group facilitation to develop Lean specialists and eventually Green Belt certified resources within your organization. During the first two days, each participant will earn a Lean Certification, followed by 2.5 days of Six Sigma tools. Each participant will be allocated 6 hours of consulting as part of the course registration fee to guide the student through coaching and executing on their Green Belt project. The student will earn the Green Belt Certification after completing the tollgates and realize $50,000 in cost savings or additional revenue generation for your company.

We firmly believe that if we don’t test our employees, our customers will. So we use the LMS to get ahead of the curve by creating a short test for each job function in our business. Sometimes they are procedure questions that relate to new processes or best practices. Other times they are questions geared towards measuring our staff’s knowledge of our product lines. When the results come in, we target training in the areas with the highest percent of incorrect answers. Although we’re still early in our implementation of LMS, we expect drastic improvement in our service levels over time.” Deborah Kloman-Lichter, VP, Operations & Business Development | Brenner Fiedler & Associates, Inc.

3. Create a Business Intelligence Framework for Your Organization By creating a business intelligence framework for your organization, you will be able to develop a plan with clear, practical, attainable goals to achieve maximum benefits to meet organizational and management requirements for metrics and business Management. Using our agile, business-enabling architecture, Epicor ICE is a modern and visionary technology that enables Prophet 21 users with enhanced levels of mobility, accessibility, and interactivity among business applications. Epicor ICE acts as a connector and an application builder, providing distributors with access to the latest applications and technical capabilities while still taking advantage of Prophet 21’s industry-leading distribution functionality. Some features include: • Business Activity Queries (BAQ) • Dashboards with mobile accessibility and editing capabilities • Enterprise Search • Service Connect

Did You Know? You can use available CRM (Customer Relationship Management) options to enter opportunities, see these opportunities in order entry, and track lost opportunities to competitors.

We’re Live! Now What? A Practical Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Epicor Prophet 21

| 9

Checkpoint:

Nine Months After Go-Live 1. Process Review: Prevent the Bad Habits When employees “train” themselves into processes that are not optimal, it tends to result in errors, inefficiency, and lost revenue potential. It’s advised that you re-engage with an application consultant and conduct a formal review of your accounting, inventory, purchasing, and sales processes. †† AR – Don’t let profits slip away due to loose collection practices. Review

processes to shorten ARO days, control customer credit, and maximize your profitability. By reviewing your processes, you can improve both cash flow through better credit management and the analysis you can conduct about your customer information. You will become more efficient and better your general accounting procedures and workflow. ††  AP – Just as you are often willing to make a deal with your customers,

your vendors may be willing to do the same. Don’t let these opportunities go to waste. Learn ways to analyze vendor information in Prophet 21 to minimize your payables through negotiated pricing, terms, and incentives with vendors. †† Purchasing – Is your purchasing team aware of specific reports and

information in Prophet 21 that can help them strategically negotiate with your suppliers, or ensure you’re capturing correct costs associated with purchases? Are your supplier control/target values set up properly to take advantage of free freight and minimums? †† Sales – Are you servicing and pricing your customers appropriately?

Learn how to best analyze and rank your customers by sales, profit, and payment history in order to maximize profitability. Also review commission options that can better incentivize your sales reps to higher levels of performance. †† Inventory – Inventory can be classified as fast, slow, erratic, new, or

dead. Learn to properly classify, monitor, and trend your inventory while introducing new levels of automation for your business, and understand how advanced forecasting principles can help you better anticipate replenishment needs.

Don’t fall too far behind Prophet 21 version upgrades. It’s easy to get comfortable with the version you’re running, but each release has features that can improve specific business processes. Stay current with recent versions by downloading or requesting them from the Customer Web site. There is also a ‘Changes Between Software Versions’ page on the site that you can use to see what has changed between the version you were on and the version you’re upgrading to, so you’ll know how to prepare your staff for the upgrade.” Joe Murphy, Director of Information Technology Interstate Connecting Components

2. Confirm Current Knowledge Retention and Go for More!: By this time your employees should be well trained in their specific areas. This is a good time to confirm that they have retained this knowledge. Through the LMS, you can create your own tests or utilize the canned tests available within the system. Your users should also be ready to leverage some of the powerful features The Prophet 21 system provides. Keep an eye on message center for new feature training courses as well as assign these courses located in the All End Users > Productivity Tools directory of the LMS course catalog. Accessing Data with Prophet 21 Query Tools • Automating Work Flow with Business Alerts • Effective Use of Document Links • Entering and Editing Notes We recommend you give employees six weeks to take these courses and then assign follow-up tests on the course material.

Did You Know? Every month, Epicor releases a new build which includes new functionality along with resolutions to open issues. If you have a custom build, please verify that you are able to update to the most current build prior to proceeding. If you have missed some updates, make a list of each new feature by build to prioritize by which features can save you the most time if implemented. Visit www.epicor.com and select support, file center, download center to download the latest releases.

We’re Live! Now What? A Practical Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Epicor Prophet 21

| 11

Checkpoint:

One Year After Go-Live

1. Implement a Disciplined Pricing Strategy There is no greater lever your company can pull to immediately increase its profitability than a disciplined pricing strategy. Unfortunately, research conducted by Strategic Pricing Associates, Inc. (SPA) has shown that most distributors either charge customers too little or too much for the products they buy. Both have pitfalls: charge customers too much, and they are less likely to do more business with you; charge them too little, and you’re leaving money on the table. Epicor’s optional Strategic Pricing module helps you get all your transactions to that optimal price—not too high, not too low, but just right. If you haven’t done so already, now’s the time to give serious thought to your pricing strategy and discount practices. Often, distributors will pass on undeserved discounts to customers without any actionable data that considers true cost to serve. Implementing Strategic Pricing can result in true pricing discipline and improve your margins anywhere from 2-4 points in the first year alone on affected items. Distributors have even commented that an investment in Strategic Pricing returned enough in the first year to cover the cost of the entire Prophet 21 system! Contact your Customer Account Manager for more information.

2. Take Advanced Training Courses Your one year anniversary being live on your system can be celebrated by taking the next step in your employees’ educational journey. To get your staff beyond their intermediate knowledge level, the following courses are available for free to LMS subscribers: • Managing Lost Sales (order processing) • Using Sales History as an Order Entry Tool (order processing) • Perfecting Your Month and Year End Closing Routines (accounting) • Creating Financial Statements (accounting) • Utilizing Vendor Rebates (accounting) • Effective Cycle Counting (inventory and purchasing) • Wireless Warehouse Management Solutions with Lots and Bins (inventory & purchasing) • Scheduled Orders: Typical Scenarios (all end users) • Pricing Customer Orders with Margin of Last Sale (pricing) • Using SQL SELECT Statements (system administration)

Did You Know? You can let Prophet 21 automatically recommend go-together items based on your sales history. You simply set the parameters as to what items to combine within the solution (based on items sold together more than a certain percentage of the time) and Prophet 21 links those items automatically, saving your sales team from having to set this up manually. You can do this on your own or have an application consultant assist with this process over the Web.

3. Build Accessory (Go-Together) Items Prophet 21 includes an accessory items feature to offer you additional cross-sell opportunities during the order process. This will increase your sales revenue by enabling your salespeople to suggest possible items their customers may need, based on products that are often sold together. For example, if you sell a power drill, your salesperson should ask the customer if he needs drill bits. When the master item is entered during the order or quote process, an accessory items window prompts you to ask the customer if they would like to purchase the accessory item, and in what quantity.

4. Consider eCommerce to Drive Down Business Costs Service your customers 24 hours a day and drive down your business costs at the same time. Take the time now to evaluate how the Prophet 21 E-Commerce (B2B) solution can help by providing self-service portals to your customers that allows them to view their activity including: purchase history, credit status, create orders, request quotes, view and expedite orders, and pay open invoices. If you already have our B2B solution, we can help you implement new features that will provide value to your customer and generate revenue for you.

5. Add B2B Content to Understand Your True Customer Profitability We have found the Worldwide User Group (WWUG) to be an effective first source of information when we are experiencing a particular challenge (e.g. specific portals, website changes, wireless warehouse bar-code guns, etc.). By not ‘reinventing the wheel’ as a result of information provided by the WWUG, has helped us save time and money in reaching a desired outcome.” Jorge Echave, CEO | Midwest Wholesale Hardware

Not all customers are the same. Sometimes you need to confidently, selectively, and smartly say “no” to customer requests. Understanding a customer’s true “cost to serve” will help you make better decisions about discounts and services you offer to each customer. The goal is to protect your most profitable customers and work with the others so they don’t continue to erode your margins. Monitor the following customer activity such as: delivery costs, average order lines, average order value, average days to pay, net profit, and percent of cancelled orders. Be sure to involve your front-line employees in the discovery process. Epicor Customer Profit Analyzer is an optional solution that makes this process simple. It ranks your most and least profitable customers based on criteria and weighted rankings that you determine. Now you can know for sure which customers you should protect at all costs and which ones require a change in strategy to make them more profitable for your business. Contact your Customer Account Manager for more information.

We’re Live! Now What? A Practical Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Epicor Prophet 21

| 13

Checkpoint:

18 Months After Go-Live

1. Have You Seen Your Warehouse Lately? Warehouse slotting (or “profiling”) is the process of identifying the most efficient placement for each item in your warehouse. Since every warehouse is different, proper slotting depends on your unique product, movement, and storage characteristics. The goal is to pick items more quickly and accurately, with less risk of injury to your workers. There are some common slotting guidelines all distributors should follow: When customers are asked what they do with their “dead” stock, the replies vary. However, one of the more common responses is, “Pitch it in the attic!” There are a number of things you can do to help re-define your warehouse space and purge dead stock. You can start by ranking your inventory by how many times you pick the items, making sure these items are stored close to the shipping area in the warehouse. You can also establish an inventory classifications to allow for dead stock tracking. When eliminating this dead stock, you can create a sales promotion and a special pricing book for these items. Once you have purged your dead stock, you can consider using wireless warehouse management and start to define zones and bins for picking. You can also barcode your “A Class” items as an easy way to start the process. If you need some help getting started or with some of the “heavy lifting” Epicor is happy to lend a hand.

Contribute your ideas for enhancing the Prophet 21 application using the Ideas Network. The Ideas Network can be accessed via the Epicor Customer Web Site, and allows you to submit new ideas for feature enhancements, or rank and discuss existing ideas submitted by other users. It’s a great way to communicate feedback to Epicor’s product management team and influence the future direction of Epicor products.” Chad Olson, IT Leader | Field Fastener Supply

2. Embark on Advanced Demand Forecasting By this time, you’ve built up enough sales history in your Prophet 21 system to start employing Advanced Demand Forecasting (ADF) methodology. Using an intuitive system of industry-proven weighted averages, standard reports, graphical views, and flexible user-defined formulas, ADF increases the accuracy of your forecasts, eliminates manual demand calculations, and improves your understanding of the relationship between forecast and usage patterns. ADF functionality applies a series of statistical formulas to each item within the demand calculation to give you a more accurate performance forecast than that of a simple average. To forecast the performance of trending items, ADF applies a weighted trend factor to the forecasted usage that provides you with an accurate understanding of the movement of an item. While courses available on the LMS provide a basic understanding of ADF, Epicor recommends you speak with a seasoned Prophet 21 consultant who can show your inventory managers and purchasing agents how to customize the weighted formulas and trend factors to best fit your company’s inventory needs.

3. Create Training Agendas for New Employees and Some Fun For The Pros As your business grows, you should prepare to on-board new employees as efficiently as possible. The LMS can help ensure new hires are properly and consistently trained on the Prophet 21 system, as well as your company processes, product lines, customer service skills, etc. Whatever your onboarding process is, you can use the LMS training agenda feature to develop a reusable template for getting new hires up to speed fast. Your new hire training agenda should be followed up with a role-specific training agenda to ensure rapid adoption of the system and company processes. And don’t forget to monitor progress using the LMS training agenda reporting tools. For those who have been with you the whole time, remember to have some fun with education! You could develop incentives for employees who complete the most courses taken in their areas of expertise or have the highest test scores. This can be monitored through their transcripts which can be printed out and put in their HR file or exported into a spreadsheet for tracking purposes.

4. Understand Your True Customer Profitability Not all customers are the same. Sometimes, you need to confidently, selectively, and smartly say “no” to customer requests. Understanding a customer’s true “cost to serve” will help you make better decisions about discounts and services you offer to each customer. The goal: protect your most profitable customers and work with the others so they don’t continue to erode your margins. You can start by tying your costs to customer activity, such as delivery costs, average order lines, average order value, average days to pay, net profit, and percent of cancelled orders. Be sure to involve your front-line employees in the discovery. Epicor has an optional solution that makes this process simple: Epicor Customer Profit Analyzer ranks your most and least profitable customers based on criteria and weighted rankings that you determine. Now you can know for sure which customers you should protect at all costs and which ones require a change in strategy to make them more profitable for your business. Contact your Customer Account Manager for more information. We’re Live! Now What? A Practical Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Epicor Prophet 21

| 15

Checkpoint:

Two Years After Go-Live

1. Become Lean Describing Lean is difficult because it is not just a tool, but instead, a culture, philosophy, process and methodology. Lean in its simplest form is turning waste into value. More importantly, it involves getting employees thinking and motivated to make processes better. Lean analyzes endto-end processes and determines how to deliver more to the customer with much less. Lean means being more organized than ever before, to free up capacity that can improve customer value. Most importantly, it is striving for perfection in every process, customer order, and dollar invested in the business. Epicor Business Consulting services help improve your financial position, operating efficiencies, and gain a better position for growth. Our Business Consultants are authorities in Lean and Six Sigma techniques and have deep distribution industry expertise. Our engagements help organizations plan and execute large projects, implement continuous improvement programs, manage risks due to corporate change, and how to best improve your performance to enhance your bottom line. Epicor recommends you embark on the Lean journey with a small scope project, like organizing your warehouse floor, or performing a “Value Stream Map” on three customerfacing processes to identify and eliminate wasted time, effort, and non-value-add activities.

2. Develop Tests on Company Policies and Procedures In addition to delivering educational content and testing employees on their Prophet 21 knowledge, the LMS allows you to develop your own test questions on the topics most important to your business. Perhaps you would like to gauge your employees’ knowledge of your product lines or company procedures, or their customer service skills. Try developing a couple of tests on critical processes that employees need to know in order to properly serve your customers. Track the scores and work on addressing the needs of those who struggle the most with grasping the procedures. Some distributors have gone so far as to develop an entire certification program that allows their employees to continually progress in their job function. As education is a lifelong process, remember even though many in your organization are power users by now, the system is also evolving and so is the training content. Check on a monthly basis for new or updated courses and evaluate which ones of these would benefit most to your employees.

3. Perform a System Settings Review We designed Epicor Prophet 21 to help you manage day-to-day business automatically with a wide variety of alerts and automated functions. In fact, there are more than 1,000 system settings (and more are added with every release) that can help automate your business processes and lead to profitable, efficient operations. If you have not had a recent evaluation of your settings, chances are you could benefit from new or existing automated settings to help your business run more efficiently and with better customer service.

Don’t ignore ongoing employee training as a critical factor in your company’s profitability. The investment we put into educating our staff each year on better business processes and new and advanced features of Prophet 21 pays off many times over, in the form of higher customer satisfaction and greater revenue per employee. You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you cut ongoing training and improvement from your budget.”

Epicor recommends you review your system settings at least every other year. While you can attempt this on your own, a single four-hour Web-based consulting engagement with an Epicor consultant is your best bet to target the Prophet 21 system settings that will save you money and make your employees’ jobs easier. If your system settings are not properly configured, you may be performing more manual steps than necessary. (We’ve seen some distributors spend 15 minutes executing tasks that can be done in seconds.)

Did You Know? • D  id you know you can automatically place customers on credit hold if their invoices are more than a specified number of days past due? By not having to manually monitor and adjust this status saves your AR person’s time, helps reduce collection days, and improves cash flow • D  id you know you can force an order entry pop-up window when a requested item already exists on an open customer quote? This prevents location-shopping and scenarios where a customer gets upset because they are quoted or charged different prices

Renee Lytle, CFO | E.B. Horsman & Son

We’re Live! Now What? A Practical Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Epicor Prophet 21

| 17

Beyond

the Two Year Roadmap

If you’ve made the effort to proceed with at least half of the recommendations in this brochure, you are certainly well on your way to becoming a more profitable business, and you can move forward in developing a culture of continuous improvement. In many cases, Epicor can assist with our products and services. The following action items should all be considered as you continue your journey: †† C  ontinue to measure and target improvement on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and work towards “best in class” performance as it relates to your industry †† A  ttend Insights (Epicor’s users conference) every year and persuade your colleagues to come, so they can learn how to be more efficient in their jobs and network with other distributors †† S tay on top of new technologies that bring bottom-line value and differentiate your business from the competition †† L et Epicor feature your business in a customer success story, and you’ll have a piece you can show to prospects to prove that you are a leading distributor in your market! Please let us know how we are doing at supporting your business in its growth and profitability. You may occasionally receive a request to complete a survey; please tell us what we’re doing well, and where we need to step up our efforts. We want to continue to improve ourselves as a company to improve our service to you as our customer. We realize that our success is predicated entirely upon your profitability as a business. Let’s work together to achieve great things.

We have found that Epicor listens to its customers, so we participate in Prophet 21 user teams, focus groups, and beta tests. My recommendation to other distributors is to get involved; it can only benefit you in the long run.” Cathy Arbuckle, Systems Administrator | Productivity Inc.

We’re Live! Now What? A Practical Guide to Getting the Most Out of Your Investment in Epicor Prophet 21

| 19

About Epicor Epicor Software Corporation is a global leader delivering business software solutions to the manufacturing, distribution, retail, and service industries. With more than 40 years of experience, Epicor has more than 20,000 customers in over 150 countries. Epicor solutions enable companies to drive increased efficiency and improve profitability. With a history of innovation, industry expertise and passion for excellence, Epicor inspires customers to build lasting competitive advantage. Epicor provides the single point of accountability that local, regional, and global businesses demand. For more information, visit www.epicor.com.

Contact us for more information on Epicor Products and Services  +1.800.776.7438 

Corporate Office 804 Las Cimas Parkway Austin, TX 78746 USA Toll Free: +1.888.448.2636 Direct: +1.512.328.2300 Fax: +1.512.278.5590

Latin America and Caribbean Blvd. Antonio L. Rodriguez #1882 Int. 104 Plaza Central, Col. Santa Maria Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, CP 64650 Mexico Phone: +52.81.1551.7100 Fax:      +52.81.1551.7117

 [email protected] 

Europe, Middle East and Africa No. 1 The Arena Downshire Way Bracknell, Berkshire RG12 1PU United Kingdom Phone: +44.1344.468.468 Fax: +44.1344.468.010

 www.epicor.com

Asia 238A Thomson Road #23-06 Novena Square Tower A Singapore 307684 Singapore Phone: +65.6333.8121 Fax: +65.6333.8131

Australia and New Zealand Suite 2 Level 8, 100 Pacific Highway North Sydney, NSW 2060 Australia Phone: +61.2.9927.6200 Fax: +61.2.9927.6298

The contents of this document are for informational purposes only and are subject to change without notice. Epicor Software Corporation makes no guarantee, representations or warranties with regard to the enclosed information and specifically disclaims, to the full extent of the law, any applicable implied warranties, such as fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, satisfactory quality or reasonable skill and care. This document and its contents, including the viewpoints, dates and functional content expressed herein are believed to be accurate as of its date of publication, August 2014. The usage of any Epicor software shall be pursuant to the applicable end user license agreement and the performance of any consulting services by Epicor personnel shall be pursuant to applicable standard services terms and conditions. Usage of the solution(s) described in this document with other Epicor software or third party products may require the purchase of licenses for such other products. Epicor, Business Inspired, the Epicor logo, and Prophet 21 are registered trademarks or trademarks of Epicor Software Corporation, registered in the United States and other countries. All other marks are owned by their respective owners. Copyright © 2014 Epicor Software Corporation. All rights reserved.