The Canton Group has been awarded a $12.4 million contract by the Maryland State Department of Education to provide ongoing operations and maintenance support for the Maryland Accountability and Reporting System (MARS). The Maryland State Department of Education (MSDE) has continually been recognized for their innovative solutions in school community nutrition programs and the MARS solution is used to track the approval and monitoring of financial claims by participating Agencies, sites and legacy operations.

MARS is critical to the efficient processing of customer applications and supporting materials, claims and payment processing; as well as providing oversight of customer activities, and State and Federal Reporting. The State of Maryland, federal legislation, and the General Assembly continue to place additional demands on MSDE to increase effective participation in the Nutrition Food Programs.

Services provided by The Canton Group include modifying source code and software configurations, enhancing the intranet and extranet web-based solutions hosted by MSDE, and solving logged support issues to maintain successful operation of the MARS application.

The contract requires competency in ASP.Net, Microsoft.net Framework, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft SQL Reporting Services for Scheduled Reporting, Mission Critical Operations and Maintenance Support. The Canton Group was selected for its relevant experience with these technologies as well as with web portal management, financial transaction processing, data integration, reporting and dashboards.

The Canton Group is honored to have been selected by the Maryland State Department of Education to support the MARS System. This contract award reinforces The Canton Group's expertise in supporting large scale mission critical web based systems."

– Ethan Kazi, CEO of The Canton Group