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Factory Labs + Epicor Prophet 21 Integration

How Factory Labs integrates with Epicor Prophet 21 (P21). A first-party gateway service that translates Prophet 21's APIs into live account, order, inventory, and pricing reads inside the CRM. No iPaaS, no nightly ETL.

Updated 2026-05-17 Β· Official Epicor Prophet 21 site

Epicor Prophet 21 is the dominant ERP in industrial distribution for thousands of mid-market US and Canadian distributors. Factory Labs ships a first-party Prophet 21 gateway service so the CRM can read live from P21 without a Boomi or Workato layer holding a copy of the data.

What we support

The Factory Labs Prophet 21 gateway works with:

  • Prophet 21 Cloud (Epicor Kinetic Cloud). REST + OData surface where exposed.
  • Prophet 21 on-premise. Direct database access (SQL Server) via a read-replica or DataDirect-style adapter, with order entry through P21's API surface where available.
  • Prophet 21 versions 2022.x and later. Including the patch levels Epicor has issued through 2025.

For deployments running older P21 versions (2020.x and prior), the gateway falls back to a SQL Server read pattern plus the legacy interface for writes; modernizing is recommended but not required.

What the integration does

Factory's account view live-queries Prophet 21 for:

  • Customer master. Customer, ship-to, bill-to, contact roles, payment terms, credit limit, credit hold status.
  • Order history. Open orders, recent shipments, line items, costs, prices, ship-from warehouse.
  • Pricing. Customer-specific pricing, contract pricing, list pricing, volume tiers, special agreements.
  • Inventory. On-hand by warehouse, available-to-promise, item lead times, substitute item logic, allocation status.
  • Open A/R. Aging buckets, recent payments, credit status surfaced inline.
  • Item master. Item attributes, vendor data, vendor pricing, item warehouse rules.

Write-back: order entry from quote, customer master updates, RMA-to-case linking, contact role changes.

How it works

The Prophet 21 gateway:

  1. Authenticates via P21's API (REST + OData) for modern endpoints, or via a database-replica read pattern for older surface gaps.
  2. Translates Factory's normalized JSON shape into the appropriate P21 calls on demand.
  3. Caches per-resource with TTLs tuned for P21 freshness expectations (30s inventory, 5 min pricing, 1 hr master data).
  4. Maps P21 user-defined fields (UDFs) into Factory's JSONB custom-field surface automatically; customizations propagate without schema work.
  5. Handles P21's specific patterns around drop-ship, direct-ship, and special-order workflows so order entry from Factory lands the same kind of order P21 reps would create natively.

The gateway runs in Factory's cloud by default. For high-security on-premise P21 deployments, a customer-managed gateway container is supported.

How to set it up

  1. Identify the P21 endpoint. Modern P21 cloud: REST/OData base URL. On-premise: the SQL Server read endpoint plus the P21 web service URL for writes.
  2. Provision a service user in P21. Read access to customers, orders, items, pricing, A/R; write access to orders and customer if you want full functionality.
  3. Configure firewall / VPN for on-premise. Allow the Factory gateway IP range or stand up the customer-managed gateway container inside your network.
  4. Connect Factory. Settings β†’ Integrations β†’ ERP β†’ Epicor Prophet 21. Paste endpoint, credentials, company code. Test.
  5. Map UDFs. Most P21 deployments have meaningful UDFs on Customer, Order Header, and Item. The Factory team helps map them as part of onboarding.

End to end: 3-7 days for a P21 Cloud deployment, 1-2 weeks for on-premise depending on network and UDF complexity.

What this means for your team

  • Reps see live P21 order, inventory, and pricing data without flipping to the P21 client.
  • Sales ops stops the weekly reconciliation; one record, one truth.
  • IT runs no iPaaS for the P21 bridge.
  • Inside sales can place orders directly from Factory with confidence the line items, pricing, and ship-from will match what they would have entered in P21 directly.

Pricing notes

The Prophet 21 gateway is part of Factory Labs Growth ($45/user/month) and up. No per-call fee, no per-record fee, no separate integration license. Maintenance through P21 patch cycles is included.

For comparison: typical P21 + Salesforce or P21 + Dynamics integration projects run $150,000-300,000 for the initial build (P21's interface surface is non-trivial), with 20-30% annual maintenance.

Frequently asked questions

Our P21 deployment has dozens of UDFs. Will the integration handle them? Yes. UDF mapping is part of standard onboarding. Custom fields propagate into Factory's JSONB store automatically once mapped.

Does the gateway support direct-ship and drop-ship orders? Yes. Both patterns are first-class in the gateway's order-entry surface.

What about the P21 Web UI vs the rich client? The gateway is agnostic to which P21 UI your reps use natively. Factory becomes the primary surface for sales work, while P21's UIs remain for accounting, warehouse, and other ERP-specific functions.

Can the integration handle multi-company P21 deployments? Yes. Multiple P21 companies can be wired to one Factory tenant with company-level scoping enforced through Factory's permission model.

What happens at P21 upgrade time? We track Epicor's release cadence and validate the gateway against new P21 versions before customers upgrade. Patches are absorbed on our side; customers do not redo the integration.