In this issue of JEMCO News, you’ll learn more about MyJacksonEMC – a new website and mobile application to manage your Jackson EMC account. As a member, your journey with MyJacksonEMC starts when you download the new app or visit the new website. Many of you have already started using MyJacksonEMC and we hope you’re seeing the benefits.

Like any journey, there’s always a beginning. For Jackson EMC, this latest journey started four years ago. That’s when we surveyed our members to ask about the cooperative. Through phone calls, online forums and meetings, we received feedback about our performance. Overall, members gave us very positive feedback about the job we’re doing. We also learned about areas we could improve.

One of those areas was technology. The research showed more than half of our members reported visiting our website for billing-related items. We also heard about ways to improve their online experience for paying their bill and receiving outage updates in ways that we couldn’t offer in 

the past. At the time, we used several software systems for our outage management, member information and other services. They worked on their own, but they didn’t easily work well together to provide real-time information.

A team of employees from across the cooperative was assigned to research how we could improve our technology and recommend a strategy that would make Jackson EMC better for its members. In 2017, based on those recommendations, we started to work on a project to move all our systems to a single software package.

Behind the scenes, while our employees developed plans for moving all our software to the new system, they also kept business going as usual. I commend the incredible talent, commitment and creativity of our employees who made this transition happen while staying focused on our members. As Gerry Sidhom, our project manager for this initiative, explains: “We had to build a plane, while keeping the other one flying.”

What’s landed for you is MyJacksonEMC, a new one-stop way to pay your bill, view your energy use, report outages and sign up for services. It’s exciting to see that members can do all these things more easily from a new app or website. What’s also exciting is the technology that powers MyJacksonEMC lays the foundation for additional enhancements in the future.

I’m proud of the collaboration we saw along the journey to make this project a success. For our members, this represents a leap forward for Jackson EMC to be the best, forward-thinking, innovative energy supplier, providing a friendly and fulfilling work environment.

Have ideas on what we should tackle next? Share it with me at [email protected].