Impact

The main purpose of the project is to gain-real life experience with e-Procurement at the European Commission, and to share the lessons learnt and re-usable components.

Through leading by example, the Commission wants to stimulate the adoption of e-Procurement in Europe.

Providing tools like Open e-PRIOR, will accelerate the participation of EU Member States' public administrations to the pan-European PEPPOL project and ultimately unlock the full potential of it.

Track record of sharing

The new e-PRIOR booklets (General and Technical Overview) are available on http://forge.osor.eu/docman/index.php?group_id=188&selected_doc_group_id=208&language_id=1 .

The Analysis of Business Requirements for eInvoicing in a Public Procurement Context is available at http://www.epractice.eu/en/library/288906

The demo movie of the prototype ("Basic Invoice") is available on YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azLeZIorrDs&fmt=18

The demo movie of e-PRIOR including "Invoice with Dispute" supporting e-Invoicing, disputes and credit notes is available on http://www.epractice.eu/en/tv/290845

The e-Catalogue Feasibility Study: http://www.epractice.eu/en/library/297017

The e-Catalogue Gap Analysis: http://www.epractice.eu/en/library/344054

The e-Catalogue Demo Movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHGI7re4Q_k

A lot of information has been shared with PEPPOL and the cooperation with PEPPOL has now been formalised through the development of Open e-PRIOR and the PEPPOL Connector, http://forge.osor.eu/docman/index.php?group_id=188&selected_doc_group_id=208&language_id=1 

Project results have been presented to the EC Expert Group on e-Invoicing, see http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/payments/einvoicing/index_en.htm

The project has been shared with other initiatives, such as the IDABC e-Procurement Expert Group, CEN e-Invoicing2, CEN/BII 2 and UBL International

 

Lessons learnt

A first pilot exercise was run with a handful of suppliers, between February and April 2009. The pilot included the following suppliers and service providers:

- BT through B2Boost

- Systemat through Advalvas

- Dell through Inovis

- Belgacom, Electrabel and Siemens through Certipost

The following lessons learnt or conclusions were identified

1. e-PRIOR is a sound infrastructure for e-Invoicing at the Commission; this was one of the main goals of this particular pilot exercise.
2. A lot of time is required to sign the Interchange Agreement: legal departments must be involved, it is still a paper-based process, ... During the pilot, a Simplified Interchange Agreement was drafted, clarifying that the paper invoice is still the legal invoice and the e-Invoice is only for "testing" purposes. Once we go into production with a supplier, a final Interchange Agreement needs to be signed, where the e-Invoice is the legal and only invoice.
3. A formal Kick-Off meeting is relevant: It certainly helps setting the expectations towards the suppliers.
4. Suppliers seemed not to know or find their own Global Location Number (GLN from GS1). All the suppliers had one, but often, the e-PRIOR support team had to look them up. We consider the VAT number as alternative party identification number.
5. Priorities of a supplier have an impact on the pilot timing and results: some suppliers were much faster or more pro-active than others, often depending on their own priorities.
6. The internal customer must be involved: for approval of semantic mapping, of scenarios and of business rules.
7. The number of support calls decreases with a good understanding of the Interface Control Document (ICD, available on CIRCA): technical specifications are described in the ICD, but we often received questions where the answer was already in the ICD. We tried to improve our specifications by adding FAQs.
8. The mapping of the suppliers’ data format to the UBL format was relatively easy.
9. The environment of the Supplier or third party service provider can have an impact on the pilot progress.

 See also http://www.peppol.eu/Download/public-procurement-for-the-future-conference/plenum-20th-may-2009-didier-thunus