Farewell to paper

Every day The Team Thar operates and maintains rhe 330 mgd Union Park pump station in South Boston, Massachusetts, uses mobile technology in the form of hand-held tablets to enter data on checklist forms. This allows them to store runtimes and retrieve data for monthly reports.

The team members, who service nine other sanitary, stormwater and water pumping stations in the area ranging from 1.5 to 6.5 mgd, also enter corrective maintenance work orders through a mobile application on tablets or smarlphones; the information is automatically loaded to a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).

This team`s experience offers just one example of the efficiency and other benelits that go with using mobile data collection and management technology instead of manual, paper-based methods.
Utilities that use paper forms to collect data face a number of issues. Notes coming from the field are often hard to read, and data entry can be inconsistent. Manual entry errors arc common.

These same utilities probably enter data into spreadsheets for calculations and reporting, introducing another source of errors and uncertainty. For example, has The data been entered or copied and pasted correctly? Is the formula accurate? What happens when there are discrepancies between manual and digital reports?

Furthermore, utiIitiesoften deal with file integrity issues. What happens when copies of the same spreadsheet are on multiple computers with several people updating them? How is data compared among multiple spreadsheets? What happens when permit levels change or when the spreadsheet expert leaves The organization? When utilities do nor have good answers to these questions, issues accumulate and the agency has a data problem.

The tools available for data collection in the field and analysis in the office have improved significantly in recent years. Smarrphones and tablets along with simple, flexible and affordable applications developed specifically for them make it possible to streamline every step of the collection, analysis and reporting of data.