Accounting went live on July 27th and the preparation, testing and training proved beneficial. Data was balanced on Friday July 24th and go live was a non-event. We encountered a few issues during the week but none affecting daily operations. Rusty was onsite and available to assist employees with questions and issues that arose. Payroll has processed, invoices paid and material purchased since go live. The accounting department began running the month end processes this past week.

Activity on the CC&B side is increasing and we realize go live is not that far away. Our personnel have been through scenario training and continue to validate data and practice what they learned in scenario training.

In April we began working with John Robertson on the bill print design and we received the first sample at the end of July. We are reviewing the samples, marking up changes and returning those back to John. At this point we are only reviewing the bill print design and haven’t verified the calculations are correct. We will start running the bill calculation program and reviewing bill print once personnel have been trained on the process.

Shauna is coordinating the integration testing with our third party vendors and our internal personnel. This is a project within a project. We are integrating iVUE® with our mapping system, outage management system and staking system. We implemented a full test environment in order to test the integration among iVUE® and our third party systems. We are glad we did. Some of the vendors are requiring an upgrade to their software in order for the integration to work. Not only are we testing the integration but we are testing the functionality of the upgrades to ensure the systems are working properly.

We also verified other components are functioning properly. Our bank verified the EFT file is formatted properly. The delinquent file is formatted and ready for use with our IVR system. Our project team likes seeing things functioning and tasks marked off the project task list.

Rex Moorman was onsite last week to train our personnel on how they will assign service orders and work those in the field. We are moving from a completely paper service order system to an electronic service order system and a big change for some of our field personnel. On the ABS side our construction crews went from paper timesheets to electronic timesheets and the transition went well. We had all of our personnel who will use the mobile work management system take online training prior to Rex’s visit. The online training exposed them to how the software would operate and familiarized them with the screens and terminology. The field personnel liked the software and stated it was easy to use but they need to practice. Our work management team will implement a training plan this week so the field personnel can get practice and become comfortable with the use of the software.

We are eight weeks out until the CC&B go live on October 5th. We hope it will be just another day.