National Defence committee  As of now, the Davie yard project is on time. Communication with the people in the Davie yard is easy and we work closely with them. The deadline of the end of 2017 does not apply to the vessel being delivered to the navy but rather to its being put into service. As for the multiservice ships to be built on the west coast, construction will begin in 16 to 18 months according to the schedule that has been set.

National Defence committee  As you have just said, the contract extends over five years. Options can be proposed in each of the five following years. The goal of the plan that has been established was to provide an interim capability during construction. The timelines are essentially the same. That allows us to be flexible in case it becomes necessary to use that interim capability.

Public Accounts committee  The system I'm talking about, of course, is the information system. It is one system for our department. I think I mentioned early on that some of our allies will have different systems for army, navy, air force. We do not. We track that inventory, whatever it is. It brings a complexity.

Public Accounts committee  I don't think so. We buy most of the inventory centrally. From an acquisition perspective, it is my organization that buys the vast majority of the spare parts for equipment. There is other, I would say, materiel that's bought locally in bases and wings, but when it comes to military operations, equipment, and spare parts, it's my organization that does all of that.

Public Accounts committee  There is, absolutely. In fact, with our system, when we talk about stock codes, they are NATO stock numbers. Across all of NATO, for example, we use a common approach, common fields for stock. We have multinational and bilateral agreements. “Mutual logistic support arrangements” is what we call them.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you for the question. The defence resource management information system is what you're talking about. When we describe the convergence of all of these systems we had, that's what we're talking about. A decade ago we even had two separate instances of SAP. We had a materiel acquisition support information system and a financial management system, both SAP-based, in different versions that talked to each other.

Public Accounts committee  I will talk about what we have and then give the floor to my colleague. As to our holdings, the Auditor General said that we had made a lot of progress.

Public Accounts committee  Our plan is to complete most of the stocktaking by 2020. I cannot guarantee that, one day, there will not be a single error left in our record of past inventories, even though that is our goal. We want to reduce the backlog, especially as regards value. We have to remembered as well that the inventory that accounts for the majority of the value is relatively small.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, indeed, but one of the reasons we are discussing this with you is the high value in relation to government accounts.

Public Accounts committee  Okay.

Public Accounts committee  We are talking about finishing recording the inventory, especially the value of the inventory. When we are verifying our inventory, we see how many spare parts we have and items that are no longer useful. They have to be eliminated and disposed of, which is quite a complicated process.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, there are organizations like that in Canada. We said that National Defence accounts for 82% of inventory in Canada. In the federal government, our department is truly unique because of its value. We also have our NATO partners. A number of them have the same problem and we discuss our ways of doing things.

Public Accounts committee  Sort of; more and more of our partners are using those products. At our department, we often have to issue calls for tenders. We do not choose who our supplier will be. Once we issued a call for tenders and SAP was chosen. In Canada and many other countries, including the United States, each branch of the military has its own stock inventory.

Public Accounts committee  We are aware of some. We also work internationally. Canada has been one of the leaders in setting up an international partnership consultation around inventory management with our closest allies. We are aware of companies that do it. For an enterprise system, we use SAP as the underlying system.

Public Accounts committee  Other militaries are having struggles similar to ours, which is again not about so much where they have it and where it is, but the valuation and the accounting process, etc. It is not something many militaries had automated a decade ago, and we recognize collectively that this is a new requirement.