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Building our house

10 Nov 2008 - Shaoqi Wang, Deputy Director-General
Shaoqi Wang, Deputy Director-General for Administration

Work in the ITER Administration Department is currently very much focused on the next Council meeting that will take place here in Cadarache on 19-20 November. Approaching the end of the year is traditionally the busiest time for any finance division. On top of that we are preparing all the numbers and figures related to the execution of this year's budget, the draft budget for next year and the preliminary budgets for the following years up to 2011.

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 drew 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, depending on approval by the ITER 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 & 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 the steady state electrical power network (SSEN), 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 coil industrialization, a manufacturing study of an ion cyclotron antenna, a blanket manifold manufacturing assessment, and support of the conductor qualification program. 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 the internal program 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 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 new staff scheduled to arrive. Some 112 posts are currently in the recruitment process, of which 80 posts are new.

The increasing number of staff 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. But until then there are still some tasks to complete, such as telephone cables to hide and 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.

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