Plugin initialization order

I'm getting an error when I start IntelliJ sometimes but not others that I think is related to my plugin. My plugin depends on a separate plugin (dbhelper) and registers additional dbhelper actions in the "projectOpened" method. The trouble appears to be that sometimes the dbhelper plugin isn't initialized before my plugin runs and it throws an error.

I have declared the dependency in the plugin.xml, but does that enforce an an order of initialization, or just a requirement that it is available?