Securing ITER's "Historical Data"
Last week, it was the ITER Administration Department's turn to raise its glass as it reached鈥攑erhaps not the "Big Bang"鈥攂ut nonetheless an important milestone: the transfer of historical data into ITER's SAP data processing system.
Since the introduction of the SAP system to the ITER Organization in summer 2008, all financial data has been processed and secured in SAP. But there was, of course, data generated before that date; data that was stored in Excel sheets and other formats.
A search was launched to look for a company to take care of these historical data files containing procurement protocols or contract details. "Because of the complexity of the processes, all of the companies we asked declined, saying that is was impossible to do," remembers Hans Spoor, Head of the Finance Department, "... except for one." KPMG, a firm present in 140 countries, said "yes we can," packed their suitcases and moved into the ITER Headquarters.
Over ten months, KPMG experts worked to upload hundreds of thousands of data files from the various old records to SAP. On Tuesday, 1 December, the Administration Department managed to "go live" and the historic data upload project came to full fruition. All ITER financial data鈥攆rom Day One鈥攊s now stored in identical format in one single database.