Pedernales Electric Cooperative

Pedernales Electric Manages Mobile Workforce Inventory and Policy With Visage ...

SAN FRANCISCO (PRWEB) July 11, 2011

Visage Mobile ( www.visagemobile.com ), provider of MobilityCentral, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for enterprise mobility management , today announced that Pedernales Electric Cooperative, Inc. (PEC), a private utility providing electric service to more than 238,000 meters throughout 8,100 miles in the Texas Hill Country, has deployed its solution to manage mobile devices, retain data in a centralized location and effectively administer an employee mobile policy.

PEC was in need of a solution that would significantly lower mobility cost by reducing the time, effort and cost required to manage carrier billing, and improve its employee policy communication and compliance.

"Mobile device management and mobile spending have been a challenge," said Frank Chavez, telecommunications specialist for Pedernales Electric. "With Visage Mobile, we have been able to quickly define and publish a mobile policy for our employees and proactively monitor this policy for compliance. We have not only lowered the costs associated with our program, but have also improved overall workforce governance."

Since developing and adopting a mobility policy, the majority of PEC employees have accepted its terms and are experiencing its benefits. As a utility company, safety is a top priority for PEC and they made sure to address safe driving and mobile usage in their policy. Since implementing their policy with MobilityCentral, PEC has seen a reduction in wireless costs due to increased employee and management visibility into mobile device use.

To simplify the management of their workforce, PEC has also established mobility groups in MobilityCentral. Often tied in with specific policies, mobility groups allow like users to be grouped together for tracking and budgeting purposes. For PEC, all mobile users are assigned to a mobility group based on their location and other criteria that PEC determines. These mobility groups allow them to ensure their budgets are meeting the needs of their employees, while keeping costs in check.

"One of the key features of MobilityCentral is its flexibility. Customers can configure the application to meet their specific business needs - defining as many or as few mobility groups as makes sense for their business and PEC is a great example of one of our customers taking advantage of this unique feature," said Bzur Haun, president and CEO of Visage Mobile. "PEC is also experiencing benefits that can come from simply adopting a corporate mobility policy. With defined mobility policies, companies have higher returns on their mobility investments in terms of workforce safety, productivity, flexibility, employee responsiveness to customer needs, as well revenues and profitability that can be attributed to their mobility investments.

Pedernales Electric Co-op voting begins! An overview « TexasVox ...

UPDATE: We’ve added a little here and there based on some new information we’ve gotten since first publishing this, specifically some information from NRECA (National Rural Electric Cooperative Association) and Pedernales’ counsel about the effects of converting to SMDs.

Well folks, yesterday marked the beginning of voting for the board of the Pedernales Electric Coop.  I’m a proud co-op member, something I couldn’t have said several years ago when the co-op board met behind closed doors and the board nominated its own members. But now we have returned to the principle of democratic control by the member-owners of the co-op, in no small part due to the work of Public Citizen and others.

There’s been a lot of news recently about PEC and Public Citizen’s involvement in the reform effort.  We’re not going to comment on that just yet, as we want to keep this focused on the issue at hand, which is the election.  Voters across the co-op have the opportunity to vote for two board seats and on a member referendum about future elections and how they should take place.

You can vote in three ways.  A ballot should have been mailed to you on Wednesday according to PEC staff.  In it you will see that you can vote for candidates in Districts 2 and 3 and on the question of single member districts.  You can see videos of each of the candidates at the PEC Candidate Forum online her e. We’ll let the candidates speak for themselves on why they should get your vote, as we do not and will not endorse anyone in these races.

However, what’s missing in all of this is a discussion about the pros and cons of single member district voting. Below I’ve attached the presentation we made to board candidates about what we would like to see in the future for PEC. We lay out a broad vision that investing in the future and the key to lower rates is efficiency and renewables. These also just so happen to help things like clean air, create jobs, and use little water in comparison to traditional power generation.  We believe that as a co-op, based on the principles of what a cooperative is (as opposed to a private utility or municipal utility), we have a special place in the community to be responsible, ethical, and think about the greater good of our policy choices.

Beware– this presentation is loooooooong, but I wanted to bring attention specifically to the slides about the pros and cons of single member districts.

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