As you know, we launched four new systems from Oracle on July 5th: Customer Care & Billing (CC&B), Mobile Workforce Management (MWM), online Customer Self Service (CSS), and Oracle Analytics (OUA). Everyone pitched in across the board to help the Core Team with various tasks, which included answering customer calls during the weeks after go-live.

We had 720 cut-over activities between June 6th and July 5th. Nearly 75% of those activities took place over the July 4th cutover weekend. Our team worked hard to make sure that things went as smooth as possible. We knew we would have long customer lines and a lot of phone calls on July 5th due to the holiday closing and it being the first of the month. It was obvious that our customer service representatives and cashiers in particular were well prepared. They did a fantastic job.

Before we left for the Fourth of July holiday, the operating departments were printing out work orders as always. When employees came back on July 5th, there was no more paper. This is a major transition and it appears to be going very well at this point. A lot of that can be attributed to how our OPTICS (Optimizing Processes and Technology to Improve Customer Service) teams configured each new system.

We have had some issues with our online Customer Self Service portal, but Oracle dedicated several employees to help us work through the issues, many of which have been resolved. What amazes me is that we launched the online customer system at 8 a.m. on July 5th, and immediately had 350 people try to register their accounts.

The online customer portal has since gone through a few upgrades, and we're now seeing a lot of electronic service requests, payments, etc. We're also starting to receive more and more customer compliments regarding the new system. Our customers are able to take care of more business online themselves, which is what this is all about — providing excellent service around the clock.

I can't say it enough. Everyone should be commended for a job well done.