53 T H E P O W E R O F P O S S I B I L I T Y Count down: 21 days, 3 hours, 56 minutes, 18 seconds. “Go Live Day” looms for Peace River Electric Cooperative in Wauchula, which stretches nearly from coast to coast across south- central Florida, spanning citrus groves and retirement communities. With its conversion to iVUE®, Peace River is now rid of its last manual system and gains the efficiencies of integrated tech solutions. ACooperativeSpirit But change is challenging, especially if it involves moving data on almost 40,000 customer accounts. In contrast to the blastoffs that occur at Cape Canaveral to the east, Peace River is aiming for a quiet glide into the future. “The clock is ticking away, and ‘go live’ is three weeks and four days out,” Louise Blackman, Vice President of Member Services and Business Technology, writes in a blog post. “We are counting down the weeks and days and many times wishing we could stop the clock for a bit.” And yet, so much has already been accomplished. Ryan Wolfrum, an NISC Customer Care and Billing Project Manager, spent a week training the Peace River billing staff and oversaw the validation of the bill printing. The new bill design, courtesy of NISC Sr. Support Analyst John Robertson, provides better information to customers about their energy usage and costs. Rex Moorman, an NISC Professional Services Industry Consultant, trained employees on how to switch from paper service orders to the Work Management system. When the Accounting and Business Solutions went live, crews shifted from paper timesheets to an electronic version. While the workdays are still long, everything remains on track for that magical moment. On a Tuesday in late September 2015, the legacy system is scaled down, leaving only the ability to look up customer information but not to input new data. CHAPTER THREE