No shearing, please

The City of Roseville, California, is a growing community located 20 mi (32 km) east of Sacramento. To provide capacity for predicted growth, the city and its partners built a new regional facility - the Pleasant Grove Wastewater Treatment Plant. As construction neared completion, the new plant's operators were faced with a number of operational questions: (1) How would the operators' daily logs be entered into the plant database? (2) How would operators access personnel schedules to coordinate meetings, training, or vacations? (3) Who would prepare maintenance requests? (4) Who would schedule preventive maintenance? (5) How would the operations and maintenance manuals be maintained; who would have access to them; and how would the staff know that they had been updated? To improve efficiency, the operators discussed using personal digital assistants for such tasks. These devices could eliminate duplication errors from transcribing handwritten data to digital format and would provide onsite access to a readily searchable database.