WIC ACCESS

Project Client

Client Name:	New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services (NJDHSS)
Project Title:	WIC Automation Project
Client Location:	Trenton, New Jersey
Project Start Date:	May 2003
Project End Date:	September 2003 - Implementation Operations and Maintenance - Ongoing
Contract Value:	over $5,000,000

CMA was awarded the New Jersey WIC contract in August 2003. This contract involves system modifications, central site operations, hosting, help desk support, conversion to Oracle, and system enhancements for the WIC ACCESS system which supports 150,000 WIC participants. CMA was responsible for the successful transition of the New Jersey WIC system from the former vendor to CMA. This was a major accomplishment for both CMA and the Department as CMA was able to take over responsibility from another contractor that had previously maintained the NJ WIC System for many years. CMA is pleased that we were able to help the NJDHSS out of a difficult situation that resulted in litigation with the former contractor.

This effort included installation and setup of the required hardware, hosted at CMA's robust data centers, as well as migration of software and all related data files to the new CMA environment. In addition, CMA is responsible for the analysis, development and implementation, of enhancements to the New Jersey WIC Management Information and Food Delivery Systems. Our system development effort involves a full development and implementation life cycle including requirements analysis, system design, system integration, coding, testing, installation, training, central operations, and subsequent maintenance support and enhancement development.

CMA provides Help Desk support to over 400 NJ WIC ACCESS users and is also responsible for the Central Server processing as well as the front-end processing at all local agencies. Our in-house staff of Oracle, Visual Basic and AS/400 Developers with our staff of DBA's provide support for the nightly processing, support for the local agencies daily processing, as well as functional enhancements for the New Jersey WIC System. Our on-going effort is to maintain high quality operations and a superior level of customer service to the state of New Jersey. Once an operational issue has been remedied, CMA's testing team performs regression and unit testing. After extensive testing software testing, CMA releases the software and new enhancements User Acceptance Testing on a predefined schedule. Upon client acceptance of the software and multiple Pilot sites testing it is released into production.

CMA has provided a number of enhancements /improvements to the New Jersey WIC system, including:

• MICR Food Instrument Printing
• Upgrade of Local Agency Environment to Windows 2003 and Oracle 9i
• One to One Food Instrument Reconciliation
• Implementation of New Race and Ethnicity codes
• Implementation of New Risk Codes
• Numerous Vendor Management Enhancements

CMA provides on-site support during an implementation phase of new enhancements if required by the project or requested by the client. CMA also provides Training services, training documentation the New Jersey WIC project to familiarize the Local Agency personnel with all of the delivered changes, and to instruct the users on the new functionality.

In addition to Release Notes that are provided every release, Training Notes are developed to document the step-by-step process needed to perform the system tasks. The Training Notes are written as a job aid that facilitates education of the new functionality, and then becomes a guide or reference on the days following. The new functionality is described using screen captures and descriptive references that show the users how to make their updates. The training process walks the users through the documented changes so that they are familiar with the materials, can ask questions, and become familiar with the updates to the system before executing the steps described.