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 Shaoqi Wang, Deputy Director General End of September/ beginning of October, the Financial Audit Board convened here in Cadarache for the second time. The follow-up actions to the 2007 Audit have been reviewed and were found satisfactory. The Board has drawn up its Audit Plan for 2008 and discussed possible changes to its Terms of Reference, including considerations of how best to manage future audits, possibly through support staff from the Members, dependend on approval by the Council. During the second and third week of April 2009 the Board will start examining the 2008 accounts with a fine tooth-comb. Our first priority in the Procurement and Contracts Division is to strengthen the team and to speed up the procedures. Things are already improving: within the last few weeks contracts have been placed for such diverse areas as Steady State Electrical Power Network (SSEPN) Electrical Engineering support, security services to JWS2, quench behaviour and quench detection in the ITER magnet systems, the detailed assessment of the manufacture of the diagnostic upper port plug, consultancy for Toroidal Field coils industrialization, study for the manufacturing of an ion cyclotron H&CD antenna, blanket manifold manufacturing assessment and support of the conductor qualification programme. Tender evaluations were completed for various work packages, more tenders have been issued or are in the process of evaluation. For all those who are not directly dealing with SAP you will have realized when receiving your payroll for the month of October that the document looks different from that of previous months. This is due to the fact that SAP has finally gone live in the Human Resources, Finance and the Procurement Divisions. There are still some teething problems to overcome, but the new system is stabilizing due to the support offered by our own staff within Administration and the external "SAP-helpdesk" that has been implemented here on site. Concerning recruitment, the ITER Organization has welcomed 88 new staff members since the beginning of this year. As of 30 October 2008, we now have a total of 293 staff, including 217 professional and 76 technical support staff, plus 24 temporary staff and 4 visiting researchers. By early 2009, the total will be 340 with the new staff scheduled to arrive. 112 posts are currently in the recruitment process, of which 80 posts are new. The increasing number of taff in our ITER team leads me to another challenge we have to face: office space and the move into Joint Work Site II (JWS2), our new Headquarters, on site. Next week, on Monday 17 November, JWS2 will officially be handed over from Agence ITER France to the ITER Organization. The next weekend, 22-23 November, the first departments will have to pack up and move over. But until then there are still some tasks to coplete, such as telephone cables to hide, computers and air conditioners to install, although these days we prefer to speak of heaters. All this requires a whole lot of logistics involving, of course, our safety and security officers, as we will then be working on a construction site. << return to Newsline #57 |
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