Ms Aideen O'Riordan:

Currently in the City of Dublin ETB - and in many of the ETBs - we operate two separate systems. The traditional system is the SunSystem, which was in the old ETB side of the house. When the training centres came on board they used SAP and this was kept because of the integration of all the systems within FÁS. We currently integrate SAP into our SunSystem for our annual accounts. That causes part of the delay in preparing the accounts. The idea behind finance shared services is basically to have one finance system for each ETB. It will be operated out of a shared services centre, with the 16 ETBs each having their own company in the shared services. The main areas for processing will be the accounts payable, which will be quite labour intensive, and a general ledger function. There will be a lot of input from the schools and centres under the shared services model. It is very important that a lot of training would be given right across the board and not only to head office staff, which is where the core finance function currently is. Training will be needed at school and centre level also because they will have an increased role to play under the shared services environment.