In-house technical committees and work groups have been formed to coordinate with the consultant, ITX Technologies, and to follow up on their work. Project technical advisors with extensive experience with the operations and policies of the Maintenance Administration were selected to act as coordinators between the in-house work groups and the consultant. Their role includes helping the consultant better understand the decision making process within Maintenance Administration so that the system is developed in a manner that meets MA's needs and local conditions. It was realized that training is crucial to the future operation of the completed system. Therefore, a comprehensive training program was made an integral part of the project.
Training is planned to cover field data collection as well as sofrware operation and data analysis.
In addition to on-site training, the program includes site visits to maintenance departments operating similar systems in both the US and Canada. The GIS provides a spatial index to all the infrastructure components and relates them to a common geographic base. This allows maintenance personnel to develop integrated maintenance programs that take into account the spatial relationships between different types of infrastructure. Before work is started in an area, the GIS can be used to determine comprehensively what infrastructure is there and where it is located. The GIS can be used in an operational mode to graphically select particular infrastructure elements for maintenance and have work orders automatically generated for those elements selected.