Delpy says Shared Services Centre remains on track

I spoke to David Delpy about the the accusation from Cardiff’s John Seddon that RCUK’s Shared Services Centre is a “fantastically expensive failure”. As of a couple of months ago, the EPSRC’s chief executive is also responsible for the SSC. And he is confident that, contrary to what Seddon claims, the SSC will soon take over all the planned functions from the individual research councils and generate substantial savings.

Delpy says the transition to the SSC covers two areas. The first is finance, personnel and procurement, on course to complete by December with only MRC, BBSRC and parts of NERC to go. The second is common grants management, the bit that will affect researchers and universities. This is on course to start transitioning at the end of this year and complete early next year.

Procurement has already transitioned to the SSC and is on track to generate savings of £25 million this financial year. Partly for this reason, Delpy remains confident that the planned savings of £456m over 10 years will be achieved.

The project is running something over a year behind the original schedule, Delpy says, but its scope has grown beyond that originally planned.

Delpy also says Seddon was wrong to cite £40m as the original cost of the scheme. That was only the cost of the main computer system bought from Fujitsu. All in all, he says Seddon’s accusations are “unjustifiable”.

And he says that the SSC is vital in the context of the government’s budget squeeze.

“The research councils  are going to have to make savings of a third in their administration,” he says. “I don’t see how we could do that without common back office functions.”

Comments

[Vicky]

er...its scope has grown beyond that originally planned? for this read project was not planned very well, and over budget and late because of.