By Damian Winters
Damian Winters
Customer Care Manager
Farm Service Agency
The SAP (MIDAS) Operations and Maintenance team extends from Kansas City to Washington, DC, providing contact points to the IT Services in KC and the business functions in DC. The team has worked to build processes for effectively capturing, analyzing, and resolving incidents that users encounter in the SAP (MIDAS) application. We are tasked with monitoring the application, managing incidents and problems, developing fixes, and moving those fixes successfully into the SAP (MIDAS) application. It is a large task, but with continued support from both the business functions in DC and the IT service providers in KC we are getting better each day at providing the services required for FSA employees to help America’s farmers, ranchers, and producers.
Continual service improvement is a cornerstone of IT service and the O&M team is using every opportunity to look for improved methodologies, processes and procedures. Recent activities to improve service include the implementation of a customer survey. Included in all ticket resolution notices, this survey allows the user to provide valuable feedback to the customer care team regarding his or her experience and the level of customer service provided by the team. We are also excited by the opportunity of Release 2.0 to provide even more functionality within the SAP (MIDAS) application. With many lessons learned from the Hypercare period immediately following last year’s SAP (MIDAS) release, plus improved processes and procedures, we are looking forward to providing another round of increased support immediately following the release. We will be providing additional updates as we draw closer to the Go-Live date and we hope to launch a new area within USDA Connect specifically for customer care updates regarding information pertinent to the user experience!
It is only with your help of identifying issues within the system that we are able to fully understand and prioritize the issues that we work on. Please continue to send in incident tickets when you encounter issues within the system and respond to the customer surveys so we can continue to improve the IT services for FSA employees.
