Industry Expertise - Smooth Implementations to Smoother Processes

When I heard the news about the one-year implementation project completed in 4 months, I really wanted to interview the people who made it happen. And when I did - boy it turns out they make a whole lot happen on a regular basis - Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC) is just one great example!

That is to say that Bruce Jumper, technical consultant, and Jamey McCay, services manager at Trimble Energy North America, know how to get things done for our customers. Their team basically combines all the services you could wish for - from the preliminary assessments to implementation, customer consultation, and training.

​Jamey lists: “We do the project management and execute the implementation and configuration of the software including, for example, server installations. We also take care of the technical support and training for the end users”. Bruce continues: “We usually go on-site, spend a couple weeks per customer and go through the different training and workflows within the software together”. The exact project contents depend on the specific customer needs, and are adjusted and agreed on together with each customer.

“The most important part is truly understanding the customer's workflows and needs within the software.”

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IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Bruce Jumper
Technical consultant at Trimble Energy North America
Support, consultation and training at Trimble since 2013
Bachelor of Science (Geography) 2011, Master of GIS 2013

Jamey McCay
Services manager at Trimble Energy North America
Support, consultation and training at Trimble since 1998
Bachelor of Science (Geography and Biology) 1996

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​While there is a Trimble Energy training facility in Huntsville, Alabama, for additional training, the team prefers on-site training. “We’ve found it's better to go on-site and use the customer’s own data sets to get the most out of it,” Bruce says.

Bruce emphasizes the importance of understanding each customer’s processes and needs. That’s why they usually go on-site to review the use case, learn how the utility currently uses their software, what their processes depend on and what their specific needs are. “In the end, all the utilities basically do the same thing, but they all work totally differently. So once we know what is needed, we are able to optimize the software and the workflow processes for them. This varies a lot between each customer but we aim to the same goal, just the process to get there is different”.

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Case Study: Success at PEC

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​The deployment is an iterative, evolving project done heavily in cooperation with the utility. “The implementation and the first core user training happen almost simultaneously,” Bruce explains. “We then adjust the configurations, go through them together with the utility and let them test, including things like the look and feel, permissions and user interface functionalities, as well as the symbology and map labels”. The work continues until the utility is happy with their system. “Then we start the workflow training, meaning they tell us a scenario in the real world and we show them how to make it work for them in the software,” Bruce concludes.

“The majority of time it’s hard to let go of your processes, because you’ve done it a certain way.”

Jamey continues: ”The majority of time it’s hard to let go of your earlier processes, because you’ve done it a certain way. PEC set a really great example because they were just willing to say ‘show us what you got’, reviewing their current processes and realizing that by changing them, they make their work more efficient. So they adopted some easier workflows that we were able to show them, and now they can take full advantage also of their software”.

So it took me a while before this dawned on me; it’s not actually implementation that these guys are talking about. They’re talking about cooperation with the utility to make sure they work in the most efficient way possible - and getting a little help from the software is just one part of it. Bruce, Jamey, all of our implementation team - I salute you!

-Hanna

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