Jacksonville Electric Authority
The Situation
Florida’s Jacksonville Electric Authority (JEA) installed CORE’s payment processing system to process its electric utility bills in 1989. Today, its transaction rate has quadrupled and the JEA serves 360,000 electric customers, as well as 240,000 water and 186,000 sewer customers. With more than 90 cashiers in nine branch offices recording transactions, the JEA processes about $25 million monthly in revenue, with each branch handling about $100,000 in revenue daily from electric, water and sewer accounts. Over the years, the JEA has aggressively streamlined the processing of its over-the-counter cashiering with customized upgrades and system interfaces keeping pace with its volumes.

Initially utilizing a mainframe system for payment processing, the JEA had to deal with duplicate data entry at the branches, tedious searches for histories, limited reporting and a critical two- to three-day lag in posting branch payments to the mainframe system. Further problems with mainframe failures often resulted in lost data that had to be re-entered.

The Solution
With the first CORE client/server configuration, CORE seamlessly integrated its system with JEA’s mainframe system and linked all the branch offices. Then in 2003, the JEA switched to a new customer information system. However, because of the way the CIS system processed records, there was no way of reconciling which branch office payments were coming from. CORE developed function and interfaces to recognize and tag data streams coming from JEA’s CIS system to allow it to identify the branch source for each payment.

Interfacing with JEA’s CIS and financial systems, the latest CORE upgrade is autonomous in handling off-line payments and then updating the CIS and financial systems when on-line. It has evolved into JEA’s revenue management backbone, recording payments to entire accounts and/or partial payments to detailed charges or service type codes. One-Step's flexible, modular design has been the perfect fit for JEA’s ever-changing, ever-expanding needs.

The Benefit
One-Step's functionality, reliability and scalability has improved JEA's rock-solid processing operations for more than sixteen years. The system's custom design and recovery features allow real-time recording of walk-in payments, cash reconciliation and host updates, as well as independent branch office processing during mainframe outages. If the mainframe goes down, payments are processed off-line and quickly transmitted to the host once service is resumed. While its transaction and revenue volumes have soared over the years, JEA has reduced error rates, increased productivity and achieved tighter fiscal control.

The Client View
"CORE helped us install One-Step many years ago. Once we got it nailed down, the system was bullet-proof...and it still is through all the upgrades. Whatever little help we need, someone at CORE is always there. It’s how a provider handles problems that makes the difference, and CORE’s service has always been excellent. One-Step and CORE have been with us since 1989, and our relationship is strong."

Chris Floyd
Applications Analyst, Project Leader
Jacksonville Electric Authority