AWWA IMTECH57852

The Metropolitan Sewer District of Greater Cincinnati has implemented a significant upgrade to its Industrial Pretreatment Information Management System (PIMS). This Oracle based system is both comprehensive for pretreatment activities and able to interact with the District's Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) and enterprise applications such as Geographic Information System (GIS). This paper describes: the District's journey from a paper-based system to the current Oracle based system; the installation phase of data migration and configuration; and, the start-up phase. It demonstrates several points that include: the work order scheduling of monitoring; reports and correspondence; and, the LIMS interface and the compliance evaluation of laboratory results. It forecasts several points that include: the positive impact of implementing workflow using the systems "Task-on-status-change" feature; and, the integration of enterprise applications. The District's pretreatment program began with a consultant's study in 1981 using a mainframe database. After Ohio US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) approval in 1986, the District began tracking industrial monitoring, permitting and compliance on paper. In 1988, a single IBM 286 PC using a Lotus 123 spreadsheet was purchased and used for this purpose. By 1990, the USEPA's free database software PCME was used on a Token-ring Novell network. In 1993, an extensive and expensive custom-built oracle based PIMS was rolled out. However, spreadsheets persisted and by 1997 a functional substitute was constructed in MS Access 2.0 by the users. In 2001, the District purchased the PACS 2000 PIMS system from enfoTech and Consulting, Inc. of New Jersey. Multiple silos of data existed in the District's pretreatment program and installation required cooperation of the data owners, cleansing of bad data, enhancing of poor data, and mapping the resulting data set for migration into the new database. Many sets of configuration data were needed to fill in the drop down lists (pick lists) in the PACS 2000 system. Reference tasks, specific to the District, were needed for the work order based monitoring schedule. Startup presented challenges both to the users and designers with a heavy emphasis on screen navigation.