The clock is ticking away and go live is three weeks and four days out…(but who’s counting). We are counting down the weeks and days and many times wishing we could stop the clock for a bit.

Over the past several months, our employees participated in web based and classroom training. We validated data and have been introduced to Mobile WorkForce. At eight weeks until live, we started seeing everything come together. Ryan was onsite for a week of process training. He taught our billing personnel how to run the bill calculation program, process bank drafts, run the delinquent-collection processes, balancing and analysis reports. Billing personnel are scheduling time over the next couple weeks to test all of the processes. We are able to verify the processes work because of process training earlier in the project. We also have one more data conversion before the go live data cut in the event conversion programming changes are required in order for process to work,

Seven weeks to go live and we began validating the bill print. We billed two cycles and Energy Services and Member Services employees reviewed the bill to iVUE notating bill print errors. The billing department verified the bill calculations in addition to the bill print. The same issues kept surfacing and we decided to stop validating bills until programming was corrected. We billed a third cycle and began validating another stack of bills. We are tweaking the design of the bill to make the information a little easier to understand for the member. We will continue to review the bill print through the remainder of the project. Employees have expressed the exercise is helping them become familiar with the bill print and where to find the data in the software.

On top of all the activity over these weeks, we also started training on capital credits and payments. The Integration team continues to meet weekly and discuss status of testing between iVUE and third party systems. The work management team is working with end users to ensure they are using the system daily.

We are actively working on training and implementing various phases of the project. We are also strategically thinking about our Go Live. In April and May, we began planning for the cutover period considering the events that would occur during the cutover period. We will pull the last set of data for the Go Live conversion, automated systems will be turned off and employees will only have inquiry access to the legacy system. We still need to conduct business with our members and perform work in the field during this period. We have alternate methods to handle payments, service orders and member data changes during the cutover period. We developed communication plans to notify our members of the system downtime, the new features available October 5th as well as an explanation of our new bill print. The planning is coming to fruition and we will see our first communication go out to our members in the coming weeks.