Donna Martino Fuhrman, MS, RD
TrakNOW Project Manager

Registered Dietitian Nutritionist Day was March 11, and in honor of this day and National Nutrition Month, we are featuring Donna Martino Fuhrman as Employee of the Month! As a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist, Donna applies her special knowledge and skills everyday as Project Manager for TrakNOW, our Nutrition and Inventory software, and as PCS’ liaison with USDA Food and Nutrition Service.

Donna has been with PCS for over 6 years and previously worked as a supervisor at Cherry Creek School District, a long time PCS customer. In 2009 Donna moved to New York City, and began her new career in software development. Donna received her Master’s Degree from Colorado State University in Human Nutrition.

Software development at PCS is partly a science involving creating the logic that embodies the complex business rules of school food and nutrition and partly the art of creating a user experience hiding this complexity behind simple and easy to use screens and reports.

This is the challenge that Donna is faced with as each year she receives an update from USDA Food and Nutrition Service with new requirements for the “approved” software. She must interpret these requirements within the TrakNOW framework in order to incorporate the new or modified regulations, compliance requirements, and “guidance”. Not an easy task!

Donna works closely with her counterparts at USDA to make sure that every function and report provides the results that are intended in the USDA requirements and specifications. Often this can be a matter of interpretation, and the process of updating approved software can require a lot of interaction with USDA. At the end of the day, Donna and her TrakNOW team of specialists, test the updated software for on-time release to customers each June or July.

When asked about the PCS approach, Donna said:
“We endeavor to make the software as user friendly as possible while at the same time providing options to match each customer’s needs. For example, we worked very hard designing our USDA approved food based compliance reports to look very similar to the USDA certification worksheets, so that our customers and state reviewers would feel very comfortable with it during the 6 Cent Certification and Administrative Reviews processes. Our new multi-browser platform which will support Internet Explorer 11, Chrome and Safari on an upgraded SQL 2014 server. Our annual Child Nutrition Database update will be released shortly after the multi-browser version. And we plan to have at least one more release this year, with more improvements and new features.”